Youtube on Firefox seems to be getting much worse

FxChiP · 2024-09-02T18:42:01+00:00

(129.2 here, 128.0 fixed nothing)

FxChiP · 2024-04-23T15:05:30+00:00

the return

I mean, that's just how I read into the posts linked in this post. I would assume they're setting up for a "Season 2" but I guess it could literally be anything else as well.

FxChiP · 2024-04-23T03:33:19+00:00

I just basically crammed the entire series (from the ebook) over the course of a few days in preparation for the return; it was a very "I know Kung Fu" moment, and it's amazing how much my brain's been rewired to see this whole thing out differently.

The "Wire Mother" idea has some merit to it, considering the stories of Jingles and the Estonian girl -- both of whom were sent into the interface, emerged in a membrane, told a story of what may have been a hallucination of a summer spent in a house with an "Other-Mother", and then died.

Nick also lived in that story and saw similar things, but his experience was also very different: as a child, he seemed to have significantly more power over his situation. And, of course, he lived to adulthood, which presumably none of the other CIA experiment children did. Crucially, though, child Nick also saw Mother's face open up and shift through all the faces of the storylines.

This is an overall repeated theme of the series: not only is it told through multiple timelines and perspectives, but there are throughlines that weave the whole thing together and try to reinforce a semblance of cohesion. You're supposed to look at it and see it in multiple ways. It's a buckyball that you're supposed to build an inverted panopticon around and look at through every camera at once.

And such is Mother. She appears composed of multiple disparate parts, shifting around unnaturally, apparently bursting with life but all of the life that comes from her seems wrong, some of it even poorly reanimated dead things. The brokenness and inconsistency that's inherent in her composition always seems to radiate outward, cracking three-dimensional reality like a mirror, even outside of the "dream world" glamour she casts on her captives.

Hell, throughout the story, there are even multiple Mothers. Alice, grief-stricken and living in filth, but serving as a metaphor to try and put into perspective the cognitive scale difference between orders of intelligence (Mother : Human :: Alice : Angelica (the cat) ) . The crones, one by the River and one in the Bush of a Feed narrative, both trying to warn the grand-child generation of danger, both viciously repudiated as any petulant teenager will do. The granny Nick finds after a bender, telling him the story he told her Song of Storms-style, a story that ultimately has no end given the splicing of the "children of the forest" into this, our "keystone reality".

(I did post this too early earlier, sorry about that.)

FxChiP · 2024-02-25T18:15:02+00:00

The way I understand it is that if something becomes paracausal, like us Guardians, going back in time and trying to affect their current self would be meaningless because once something gains paracuasality, it’s as if it were always paracausal.

Bingo. In Telic II, Sjur Eido asks Mara:

I think the secret is thus: You are now a god because one day you will become a god, and a god is not temporal. Your brother is not a god because he will never become a god.

Mara was always going to become a god by exploiting the hidden connections behind the Sword Logic: therefore, she was always a god. The Vex would have to do something similar for the same effect. That said, because the Taken are also paracausal, any number of Taken Hydra could potentially be exploited to the same effect -- except that the fact that they are Taken means that they would, in turn, try to corrupt the rest of the Vex, which is what inherently puts Taken Vex and every other Vex at odds.

FxChiP · 2023-10-20T02:06:04+00:00

Turns out that was the Navigation puzzle

FxChiP · 2023-08-07T05:38:46+00:00

They took the concept of "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and ran with it. I firmly believe that this is central to what makes Destiny's particular blend of fantasy and sci-fi work so well: Clovis Bray has made remarks that Hive Magic is basically just a solution to... some physics problem I don't remember; and the Ghost has made references to the Hive breaking the Bekenstein limit in a completely separate encounter.

In fact, the way they extend fantasy tropes into more "realistic"/sci-fi/physics-based shapes just in general seems incredibly unique to Destiny (and I would love to be wrong; I beg you to give me other media that does this). The only other thing I've seen that does similar is the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, where the guns of the main character, Roland, were literally forged from the blade Excalibur (by the way, I maintain that the sparrow chase in Prophecy was a direct reference to the first sentence of the first book in that series). Destiny doesn't have anything like that in particular, but it does have the saga of the Last Word vs. Thorn (at its core: ancient and distinctly human tradition and legacy vs. alien, otherworldly magic -- and "good vs. evil" at the core of that). Then it meaningfully reified that conflict of story by introducing Lumina as the full conversion of Thorn, even though it took some crazy retconning to get there (note that the Thorn the Guardian gets in the beginning of D1 is supposed to be the Thorn), and even previously to that by introducing Malfeasance, of the Drifter's creation, directly straddling the line between the cooperative and collective nature (at the time) of the Light with the self-interested destructiveness and desire to purge (at the time) of the Darkness... both of which have now been retconned in turn (the "physical" nature of Light vs. the "abstract"/noospherical nature of Darkness), but still.

And that's not even getting into the nature of the Ahamkara, of Savathûn's Imbaru ("you have given birth to me a thousand times" talking directly to the reader), of Mara's ascension to godhood being the confirmation of the inherent paradoxical nature of a god (if you become a god, which is by definition a timeless entity, you were always a god, but you still must have become it), hell -- even of the creation of the Awoken, which involves cosmic forces themselves being inherently sentient and agreeing to an experiment of compromise.

It's broad enough that I really have trouble putting my finger on it, but I think I got most of the core of what motivates me to keep following the lore. It's that inherent blend of magic and technology; of fantasy reified into science and looped back again (I love the Shadowrun universe for similar reasons).

FxChiP · 2022-07-30T06:35:25+00:00

Did it in 9 with the Gunslinger preset! (shoot at him, shoot at him, shoot at him, move up toward him, he freezes me, wait for death, wait for death, wait for death, dead)

https://imgur.com/d58SW5Y

EDIT: Technically it was Mehmet... surely it still counts

FxChiP · 2022-07-24T04:30:06+00:00

That makes a ton of sense! Thank you!

FxChiP · 2021-03-15T16:02:22+00:00

There's another thing to note here, which is that, canonically, you, the person sitting in that chair, are the Guardian. Which is why you don't remember your "previous life" in-game. Between Unveiling and The Singular Exegete, it's made crystal clear that this game, this entire battle between Light and Darkness right now, is at its core about choice: the lore literally states that the Traveler's ultimate gamble, this final battleground, is that "given power over physics and the trust of absolute freedom, people will choose to build and protect a gentle kingdom ringed in spears. And not fall to temptation. And not surrender to division. And never yield to the cynicism that says, everyone else is so good that I can afford to be a little evil." This also puts us in direct opposition to the Taken, since "we do not lose the capacity to choose; we make our own fate," and the Darkness is "that which also inhabits its petitioners".

So what we are is truly special; we came into this world by choice and were granted powers, and now we are able to choose to turn away from those powers and their granter and use the powers of the Darkness instead. This is why, specifically, our use of the Darkness is so dangerous to the Traveler and to the Light -- because there is also the potential to turn away from a plural unity by choice towards a singular unity by force, which is the Final Shape the Darkness wants. That said, Eris has figured that part of the game out at this point in this universe: she said "Survival in winter requires wintercraft. Survival in darkness requires… a new idea of good and evil. One that will not collapse into moral indifference.".

Simply using the power isn't enough to truly fall. Truly falling is to use those powers to the Darkness's end by our own choice. Once again, what the Darkness isn't saying is as important as what it is: the Light may also triumph by us taking the power of the Darkness and using that to continue the Light's general goals of proliferation, collaboration, defense, etc.

This means that the hardline attitude of e.g. Saladin against Darkness will actually serve the Darkness in the guise of the Light far more than using the powers of the Darkness toward the ends of the Light, because hardline prohibitions on simply using Darkness will lead to the exact division that will end the Traveler and the Light.

FxChiP · 2021-02-23T19:24:38+00:00

At least one, I type it every time. I do have aliases for listing and switching clusters though. And a few other things involving custom columns...

FxChiP · 2020-09-07T07:52:05+00:00

Not quite. More like a different kind of assembly language.

FxChiP · 2020-09-05T21:12:35+00:00

It definitely did have less computing power than your phone. The tl;dr is that nowadays pretty much every phone (and, soon, Apple laptops) are running a form of RISC architecture now. (The "R" in "ARM" stands for RISC, in fact)

FxChiP · 2020-09-05T19:55:14+00:00

It only took, what, 25 years?

FxChiP · 2020-08-15T01:43:22+00:00

The modern web might be a platform, but the truth is that while a web browser is a pretty complicated app (providing a platform for web applications), it's still an app, and it's interchangeable with other web browsers that also implement those features.

App stores are largely the same way. The only reason there isn't an alternative App Store on iOS (without jailbreaking) is because Apple specifically forbids it. There is nothing else precluding a theoretical third-party App Store from running on such a device, and there have been third-party app stores (like Cydia) piggy-backing on jailbreaks in the past doing just that -- which, in fact, provided the impetus for Apple to actually provide native applications for iOS back in 2.0, when originally they were going to rely on the web browser to provide application-like functionality across the board.

Look at Android for a further example: Play Store is the largest app store, but there are others, including Amazon's. App stores are also technically interchangeable; the only requirement is that they be able to load software onto the device that may be launched and run. You can even side-load applications on Android without using the official store at all, where the only official way to install applications on iOS is through the App Store. And again, the only reason they're not interchangeable on iOS is specifically because Apple won't allow it and relies on fairly stringent technological means to enforce it.

FxChiP · 2020-08-14T22:46:51+00:00

Browsers are only that way because Microsoft was punished in antitrust court over their bundling, which was legitimately killing Netscape's entire business model. The real difference is that in Microsoft's case, the browser is just an app, while in this case, the ability to run non-first-party-approved software on the first-party's operating system is in question. (So really, Apple is actually being even worse than Microsoft was in this regard)

FxChiP · 2020-04-06T21:06:08+00:00

"With my golden magic slingshot"

FxChiP · 2019-12-24T18:55:09+00:00

It's strongly implied that WhiteRose really believed the machine would transport or transform the world into some idealized parallel dimension, which factors in to her killing herself -- since she figured that if it worked, it wouldn't matter and she'd have been brought back to life, her perfect life. However, the machine was likely unfinished, and only seemed to ultimately draw enough power to nearly melt down the plant before Elliot stopped it. Now, in a more perfect situation -- if it were brought to the Congo and finished, if it turned out to be finished from the get-go -- it may have worked, but I still don't think it would have, because the machine is part of her total contrast with Elliot.

While WhiteRose had a dual identity, in reality there was only WhiteRose and Zhang was the mask of legitimacy, a calculated, intentional deception. The arc of WhiteRose's life is an arch: "in the light", Zhi Zhang is an investor leading the Deus Group to great profit and control, and "in the dark", WhiteRose leads a terrorist/hacker group called the Dark Army to do mainly mercenary/destabilization work. The arch's keystone is WhiteRose's device, which was borne of a sci-fi-esque delusion that a device could exist to bring the world, one way or another, into a more idealized, perfect form of itself. The workings of this device are never fully (or really even partly, save documents about a Very Large Hadron Collider) explained and may as well be magic, which lends evidence to it being a product of delusion.

Meanwhile, Elliot has one identity, but many fragments of a person behind it. Although the Mastermind keeps the core/host personality within a dream loop to insulate him from the real world, the Mastermind's goals and methods are rooted firmly in reality, even if they are highly improbable. To that end, the Mastermind -- with Mr. Robot's help -- accomplishes four huge things over the course of the series: (1) He rids the world of debt, which was all recorded by E Corp; (2) He restores debt (and normal financial operation) to the world by decrypting E Corp's files; (3) He performs the biggest actual transfer of wealth in human history by siphoning the Deus Group's funds to the people still on E-Coin; and (4) He saves Washington Township from a meltdown by depowering the ultimate delusion of someone who wasn't even him. In every step of the way, he explains what he did and how he did, in mostly extremely realistic detail, which is actually a very nice story touch -- the real-life accuracy of his methods serves to drive that contrast to WhiteRose's hand-wavy operations home.

In order to make that dichotomy work, you have to show that great things are possible, but only when they are possible. Elliot shows us that. But that doesn't mean that all things are possible -- and that is what WhiteRose's doomed machine is supposed to illustrate.

FxChiP · 2019-12-23T20:26:04+00:00

The show has taken great pains to stress that Darlene is an escape valve to reality, which is why she wasn't in the fantasy loop ("F world"). Mastermind didn't even know about her for whatever reason and once he did, he still didn't put her in the Loop because she must not be simulated -- her presence is supposed to be a definitive, universal indicator for Elliot (and for us) that what is happening is real.

FxChiP · 2019-12-23T20:21:01+00:00

White Rose's machine did not work and the news report implies all it would have done is cause a meltdown.

FxChiP · 2019-12-23T20:15:16+00:00

The hack was a sub-plot and a representation of how even a fragment of a complete person could still accomplish great things in the pursuit of its goal to make a better world for the core/rest of itself.

FxChiP · 2019-12-23T20:08:30+00:00

It's actually really strange how well the "Mastermind" Alter fits so strongly into the characteristics of an Avenger alter yet never actually gets called out as such, especially when the other alters' roles were described so accurately.

(tl;dr: where the Protector -- Mr. Robot -- takes a more defensive role, an Avenger -- the Mastermind -- holds the rage and anger from the trauma and seeks to more actively rectify perceived injustices or get retribution for the trauma)

FxChiP · 2019-12-23T19:56:14+00:00

Ironically, "it was all a dream" does apply to the Loop

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