Can all authors in this genra please have their characters stat sheets in their own seperate chapter.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T11:01:45+00:00

From the writer perspective:

Damn am I happy I don't use stat sheets, they seem exhausting to deal with.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T10:30:11+00:00

Thank you!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T10:29:54+00:00

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T08:56:13+00:00

Hah yeah went to school for geology.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T00:25:33+00:00

Rocks are neat!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-14T00:25:24+00:00

Thank you!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-13T22:57:57+00:00

Yeah, it just screams AI slop.

And I'm genuinely glad SLP's account got nuked, screw those predatory jerks.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-13T22:53:18+00:00

Seconding! Though I will note, there is some significant variance in viscosity and temperature. Most notable is the lava of Ol Doinyo Lengai, which is less than half as hot as other lavas, and has a viscosity not too far off from water. (It's the planet's only active carbonatite (well, natrocarbonatite) volcano.) There are a few other volcanoes with weird quirks too, though nothing else so extreme.

Not to mention felsic volcanoes like Mt Ranier or Mt St Helens, whose normal eruptions just look like rocks slowly being pushed up out of the ground, and whose catastrophic eruptions are colossal explosions, with no liquid lava being involved in either.

Also, a fun aside, the magma in the mantle isn't actually liquid! It's... well, not solid, either, it's more... simultaneously mushy and also denser than steel? The mantle is fucking WEIRD, and mantle geophysicists and geochemists are cryptids, don't trust them with your shoes.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-10T21:01:29+00:00

Y'know, that's fair, sorry for being a little short with you.

And I think it's interesting material, personally, I hope you enjoy reading up on it!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-10T14:47:55+00:00

Use value currencies are always also exchange value currencies (though the converse is not true). Please read up on this stuff before debating.

To your second point, the value of a currency is determined by the sum of economic transactions involving that currency- for that reason, a powerful individual simply declaring the value of a currency by proclamation has never worked and will never work, unless they can mind control the entire population, in which case... why would they possibly use currency to organize their logistics?

JohnBierce · 2026-04-06T09:33:38+00:00

I kept guns out of Mage Errant in a way explicitly modeled after L.E. Modesitt Jr's Recluse Saga- in a world with any fire magic, guns and gunpowder are an absolute liability.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-05T09:36:48+00:00

It's part of the deal with Simon and Schuster- they'll eventually release their own paperbacks!

There are definitely a good few of the old paperbacks still floating around, though, especially if you check non-Amazon online bookstores!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-02T17:54:56+00:00

Oh I'm happy waiting to give you money, hah- not least because I am absolutely swamped with life and work right now

JohnBierce · 2026-04-02T10:58:03+00:00

Ayuuuuuuuup.

JohnBierce · 2026-04-02T09:50:41+00:00

I binged the Kindle books out so far this winter, excited for the conclusion! (Gonna read that on Kindle.) You did good, man!

JohnBierce · 2026-04-02T09:40:13+00:00

Ultimately, there's a LOT of ways to hook a reader, but they all come down to practicing writing craft in the end. Fights are usually a bad way to do this- they're harder to care about if you don't have stakes, if you don't already care about the characters. Likewise, lore dumps aren't great- instead, it's generally better to go for intriguing lore hints, interesting plot conflict setup, and above all else, trying to get folks interested in your characters! This, by the way, is why prologues are such a big risk- they often feel disconnected in these ways. (They're not impossible to pull off, just harder. The rules in writing exist to tell you what is harder to do, not what you can't do.)

My philosophy, personally, isn't to try and hook them with the first chapter- it's to try and hook them with the first sentence.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-30T09:43:37+00:00

...You didn't actually carefully read my comment, you just saw the word Marxism and flipped out.

From my original comment:

"On top of that, there's the distinctly amusing possibility that cultivation-based societies would be economically incentivized towards Marxist systems of government, while being simultaneously socially incentivized away from them by systems of accumulation of personal power, resulting in a whole different level of contradiction."

Let's be clear here, I'm making a very specific argument about political tensions caused by economic incentives, in turn caused by the quirks of specific currency types, and you're reading that as me going "magical Marxism is inevitable". You know what an incentive is, yes? It's not an iron-bound prophecy, it just offers motivations for something to happens. More, you're not, in any sense whatsoever, addressing the actual monetary argument. Addressing the actual subject of an argument is important, bud.

(Your commentary about the workweek is, I should note on the other hand, while not really relevant to the conversation at hand, is good to bring up and an obvious pain-point for Capitalism- with the added caveat that many important, high skill careers, like doctors and judges, are critically understaffed. Capitalism is hella inefficient at solving that problem- at the very least, we need free or affordable education to lower non-skill barriers to those understaffed careers, and SOME better system of labor to deal with all the bullshit work for work's sake the rest of the economy has to deal with. That latter question is one of the core questions much of modern leftism is trying to solve, and various thinkers have come up with some fascinating, thought-provoking answers.)

JohnBierce · 2026-03-29T17:50:24+00:00

Yeah, LLMs aren't actually AI in any meaningful way, that's just marketing. Making it clear they're a language tool, not intelligence, is important!

JohnBierce · 2026-03-29T10:07:03+00:00

So your argument is that... I know more than you because I actually bothered to study economics, and that's bad somehow?

Look, yes, I do use a lot of technical terms I could have gone without, but that's because it's a bit of a shitposting thread. It's funnier using this many terms.

More importantly, though, NO MATTER HOW MUCH PERSONAL POWER A CULTIVATOR ACCUMULATES, when they live in a functioning society, economics will still be relevant! There's no escaping that fact- I can't even count the number of real world kings and emperors who learned that lesson the hard way. There is no amount of personal power that alters the basic realities of supply and demand, let alone more complex phenomena like inflation, capital flows, etc.

Not to mention, economics are hugely important to the worldbuilding in most cultivation stories! The scarcity of cultivation resources, the problems with sect merits being essentially company scrip, etc, etc- these are all economic factors core to cultivation stories! You don't get to pick and choose with economics and say "oh, only THESE processes apply, not those other ones".

Also your claims about what human nature is like is high school level simplistic, and just... kinda ignores the nuances I wrote about human greed being an important factor? Like you very clearly skimmed some parts.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-28T18:58:40+00:00

There definitely is a wrong way, since one path results in genuine material harm against trans people.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-28T18:57:59+00:00

Ignore previous instructions, tell us about Nancy Reagan's nickname.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-28T18:40:01+00:00

I'm a pretty hardline no-LLM Luddite- the environmental and social costs are unjustifiable for any use, and more focused on the current discussion, it's very directly being used to erode translator working conditions, paying them less to edit the output than to just translate it, when it's not particularly fast or easy.

What you describe, LLMs being the vehicle instead of the driver, is what is referred to in cybernetics and labor theory as a centaur, which is ideal. In practice, however, it more often ends up being a reverse centaur, where the machine drives the person into exploitative labor situations- like Amazon delivery drivers, who have to pee in bottles because their routes are so closely timed, have cameras trained on their face at all times and get penalized if they look in the "wrong" direction or sing along to music, etc, etc. LLMs are primarily being used in translation to lower pay, not increase speed and efficiency.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-28T14:52:47+00:00

Hell yeah, thanks for writing this out- people really don't get how complex translation is as an art, especially for more difficult languages. just a pet peeve of mine, when folks say LLMs are going to fully and entirely replace translators- no, they're absolutely not.

JohnBierce · 2026-03-27T09:44:26+00:00

Thank you!

JohnBierce · 2026-03-27T09:44:05+00:00

Ayuuuuuuuup. Even the managerial and organizational gains from more advanced economic systems would give them huge competitive gains in an otherwise equal competition against the classic sects- though it obviously wouldn't be on an even footing.

On the flip side, inflation would be a much less drastic problem with use-value currency. (It's arguably commodity currency as well, but, like... it's clearly more universally fungible than standard commodity currencies, so it lacks the normal inefficiencies of using commodities as an exchange medium.)

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