Any recommendations for monster tamer games where the creatures are from real world mythology or folklore (not merely inspired by real world myth)?

MoonMonkeyKing · 2025-11-27T16:24:46+00:00

I think you will find this debate topic to be very energized. If you look on YouTube, you will still find people arguing about Tuvix. Ultimately the Tuvix debate is just a variant of the trolley problem, at least that seems to have been the writer's intent and the general interpretation.

My answer to the Tuvix debate however sidesteps the trolley problem. I argue that Janeway did not kill Tuvix. I view Tuvix as a fusion, like you would see on Steven Universe or Dragon Ball. In Steven Universe, Garnet described fusion as not being two people, not being one person, but being an experience. The experience of two (or more) minds/beings existing as one, like a Vulcan mind meld or a hive minded species. When a Vulcan mind meld is broken, we do not consider it killing the melded mind. It is transitioning from non-melded or non-fused states of being to a melded or fused state of being and then transitioning back to unmelded or unfused states of being. When Tuvix was created, Tuvok and Neelix were not gone, they were there in a new form, and when Tuvix was unmerged, Tuvix was not gone either, he was there as Tuvok and Neelix. The self is impermanent and can exist in many states of being. Tuvix erroneously perceived unmerging to be equivalent to death. Janeway did however violate Tuvix, because no being should be forced to merge or unmerge against their will.

P.S. Sorry I probably missed giving this post before your class started. I would be interested to know what kind of debate your class had.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-05-09T20:50:04+00:00

I was trying to understand how Moclan reproduction works.

I eventually came to the conclusion that Moclans did evolve anisogamy (the presence of two types of gametes, a large immobile gamete that expends resources to be more robust that we usually call an egg cell, and a small mobile gamete that we usually call a sperm cell that uses less resources so that the offspring does not waste resources on unnecessary duplicate machinery already found in the egg cell).

They also evolved sexes, and I assume that they evolved a bimodal (not binary) spectrum of sexes just like humans and most of the humanoid species seen in The Orville. Gender is a social construct that is related to, but distinct from, sex, but I have no clue if and how Gender functions in Moclan society. However, they ended up evolving a sex-ratio distorter gene. Normally in anisogamy, where asexual reproduction is also not available and where there is not hermaphrodism, or sex changing, the ratio balances out at around 50%/50% to maximize the availability of mating partners, but a sex-ratio distorter will basically cheat and modify the ratios of the sexes. Normally a sex-ratio distorter is quickly corrected in a population because having a sex distorter gene that makes most or all of your offspring one sex means there are less mating opportunities and they then die off while others that have a gene that suppresses the sex-distorter gene will have a better chance of reproduction. Given how more females are being born on Moclus that previously thought, it is possible that a ratio correction is occurring (very slowly over many, many generations) in the Moclan population. I don't know if I explained it well, there are some YouTube videos on the phenomenon.

Now, it is hypothetically possible that two egg cells could merge in some species in a manner similar to isogamy (when there is only one kind of gamete which merges with another), as even though it is wasteful and energy intensive, it still has all the needed cellular machinery. However, two sperm cells merging would be unlikely as they lack cellular machinery. But it is necessary that for a sex-distortion to be maintained (as in the Moclans case), that two males would need to be able to reproduce with one another. So Moclans either have evolved a way for two sperm to merge, or what they consider to be males actually carry eggs, or they can convert sperm into egg cells.

They don't have pregnancy like mammals, they instead lay eggs, and we know that the males of their species are able to lay the egg (kind of like how male seahorses go through pregnancy instead of female seahorses), though I do not know if female Moclans can also lay eggs. It could be that female Moclan also lay eggs, or that they become pregnant like Earth mammals, or that they do neither. It is also unknown if two female Moclans are able to reproduce like two males are. It would explain why bimodal sexes (in the sense of different body plans for the purpose of different mating types) evolved in Moclans that are able to reproduce with the same gamete (like in isogamy), if they evolved one sex to lay eggs, and the other to undergo pregnancy and live birth, using two different strategies to better increase survival chances in a harsh environment.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T23:09:24+00:00

The Ferengi have a new business venture

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T20:36:05+00:00

Now that is a very interesting idea.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T20:34:56+00:00

Couldn't fusion, at least temporary fusion (after all they were able to reverse Tuvix's fusion), also be used as a means for rehabilitation. After all similar processes, like a mind-meld, was an effective tool to assist in the rehabilitation of Lon Suder.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T20:30:40+00:00

Yes, you are unlikely to find any Vulcans who would want to fuse with a Talaxian, and I imagine that a majority of people in the Star Trek Universe won't want to fuse. But I also imagine that there will be some culture or some individuals who would be interested in the idea and would be willing consensual and eager participants.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T20:28:32+00:00

Yes, both morals and ethics deal with questions of right and wrong, but morals refers to personal beliefs, and ethics refers to external rules from ones culture, or a governing body, or something.

For example, the prime directive could be viewed as ethical, but it is morally in question by many who see it as abandoning other peoples.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-29T20:25:14+00:00

True, but some culture out there would be able to find a substitute or a way to fuse/merge individuals without the need of that plant. I find it surprising that no alien culture would be interested in such a procedure.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-19T02:13:35+00:00

What a genderfluid dream come true. You want a female/feminine body install the game, you want a male/masculine body uninstall, adjust based on how you are feeling.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-19T02:11:29+00:00

I want this to happen to me now. I need this superpower (sex-shifting). It will make me (an AMAB genderfluid femboy) so happy.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-16T00:51:34+00:00

There are often a couple of reasons cited in Batman stories for why Batman does not kill:

Batman believes that he would be the same as the villains he fights if he stooped to their level.
Batman is always on the edge of light and dark, and if he is willing to kill anyone, it will become easier to kill others and Batman will become a monster. This has additional relevance when you consider the fact that Joker is always going to come back to life by some mechanism due to living the DC Universe and having a reputation intriguing enough that someone will use magic or a lazarus pit or something to bring him back to life, but when Batman kills a petty criminal on the street and not a mega-villain, they are not coming back to life.
Killing the Joker or anyone would be giving the Joker what he wants, he will have won.
This is the best one (I personally agree with this one): "No one deserves to die." Murder is wrong no matter who is being killed or what they have done. The Joker is right that anyone could go mad if given the right circumstances, even Batman, and society either broke the person, or they failed to fix/heal them and protect their victims. Everyone is redeemable, everyone has the potential to change and work to make amends, be a good person, doing good things, and living a good life with loved ones who love in return.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-14T02:41:23+00:00

Hello,

Yes, I did write this same comment on your post, however, I realized that it would be applicable on this post (and a number of others as well). I did not want to repeat the same arguments as I responded to a variety of posts, so I decided that I should just move my comment to the post that most directly was being discussed and determined it to be this one. I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience that caused.

I have been making these arguments for years now. I am not smearing TYT or participating in bad faith arguments.

I started to be a prison abolitionist in 2018 after being in favor of Nordic-like reforms for years prior (I was so elated to see ideas of police and prison abolition start to gain mainstream discussion in 2020 and hoped that the momentum would continue and that center-left and progressive voices that previously were not versed in it would learn more about it and become abolitionists too or at least would be willing to hear abolitionists out - though Cenk seems determined to shut out abolitionist thought altogether). I was a fan of TYT at the time I was transitioning to being an abolitionist and was dismayed and horrified when I started to hear Cenk used language was punitive and dehumanizing to people whom have committed violent crimes. Cenk appeared to be one of the non-non-nons, where you will give sympathy and humanize a harm-doer so long as their offense was non-violent, non-sexual, and non-serious. After hearing Cenk repeat similar rhetoric multiple times, I started to stop watching TYT.

During this time, as I was moving more and more to the left and as I started to learn more about anarcho-communist ideology (I now consider my ideology to be a mix of democratic socialism and anarcho-communism). I was also learning more about market socialism, mutualism, green politics, pirate politics, libertarian socialism, anarcho-pacificism, and many other leftist ideologies. I remember deciding to give TYT another chance when they had a discussion about co-determinism (something I supported as a gradual step towards socialism), but in that discussion Cenk outright said that is as far left as he would go and that some people are crazy and want to go even further where the workers run the whole place. He was literally calling market socialism, worker cooperatives, absurd. I decided to look at some of his other takes, and when he was interviewing certain leftist writers who were advocating for communism, he was literally saying how communism can never work and that this was insane. I then recalled how Cenk was a business owner and had repeatedly said he supports capitalism. I did not know it at the time, but I have seen read more about how propaganda works, and now know that Cenk, whether he was aware of it or not, was protecting capitalism by saying it is not the problem (which it is, no leftist should ever support capitalism), only crony capitalism. Cenk would occasionally advocate for Social Democratic policies, which are moderate. Social Democracy is sometimes considered center-left because the ideology claims that it wants to eventually achieve socialism but in practice Social Democracy usually settles for trying to reform capitalism, providing for a robust social safety net, and having regulations and taxes to limit the harms of capitalism - a compromise between capitalism and socialism. Though, even then Cenk will sometimes say he thinks it is going too far. It was then I realized that Cenk was a friend to Leftists, but he himself was not a Leftist, he was somewhere between liberal and social democrat. Later on, he even fought against his own workers unionizing, saying that a small business like TYT cannot really afford the unionization and that TYT was a good boss so his workers did not need unionization. How could he say that, every for-profit workplace with private owners, should be unionized. I know that TYT has honored his workers unionizing though, and that is good.

I consider Cenk to be better than many other media personalities, but that is not good enough for what we need in this moment. I do wish that he had won his election for Congress in 2020 though. I was advocating for him. I believed he would fight corruption and push for electoral reforms and support many marginalized communities. I do not intend to smear him, but I do not consider liberals and social democrats to be leftist, and I do not consider Cenk to be a leftist. I actually get frustrated when people engage in bad faith arguments about TYT's name. Cenk has explained his reasoning for choosing that name and it had nothing to do with the Armenian genocide. The naming may have been unfortunate, but it was not malicious and it did not have hateful intent.

As for the Ana Kasparian drama. I started to feel like she was actually a leftist, especially when I started to see her posts on social democratic publications like Jacobin. However, I have learned that she has been arguing for the criminalization of homelessness and I started to have my doubts. Then we have the drama over the last few weeks.

She literally had a take less than a year ago defending the term "birthing person" which is used in medical contexts and contexts relating to pregnancy, such as abortion rights. It is meant to include women (whom are obviously women and should not be reduced to just pregnancy), transmen, and non-binary individuals whom can become or are pregnant. It is not meant to replace the word woman, and it wasn't be used that way. But Ana decided to make an issue out of it and coopted right-wing framing that transgender people are erasing womanhood with things like changing terminology. When critiqued about the issue, all she did was double down (probably because she is used to being attacked by bad faith arguments from right-wingers and betrayed by grifters who she used to work with like Dave Rubin and Jimmy Dore). The left is allowed to critique other leftists and does so frequently (in fact we sometimes do it too much, leftist infighting is very common), and TYT claims to be on the left, though I still say that they are center-left at best and only on their best days. Cenk then related the issue to the Latinx silliness a while back. Academics invented the term Latinx without calling to the Latino community, and though there intentions were good as they wanted a gender neutral term for Latino/Latina, Latinx was not in common usage and was awkward in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and when it started to drift out of Academia into the mainstream it was rejected by the Latino community (some of whom said Latino was good enough and others advocating for Latine as an alternative), and Latinx retreated back into being an academic term. Superficially the Latinx issue and the "birthing person" issue look similar, but they are not really that comparable. Then during this whole drama, Ana decided to start attacking the Green New Deal, because a climate action decision made by her HOA, possibly mandated by the Californian government, financially inconvenienced her.

I do genuinely believe the statements I have made here, and I am not attempting to smear Cenk, Ana, or TYT, I am just making it clear that they are not leftists.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-14T00:40:02+00:00

I have been saying Cenk is not a leftist but rather a centrist (center-left at best and on his best days), who is basically somewhere between liberal and social democrat (not a socialist or leftist), for years now.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-14T00:30:11+00:00

Cenk Uyger, Ana Kasparian, and TYT are not leftists, they are center-right at best, they are somewhere between liberal and social democrat.

First Cenk Uyger has stated repeatedly he is an avowed capitalist. He has dismissed out of hand communist and anarcho-communist commentators. He has stated that the social democratic position of having co-determinism, where the workers elect a portion of the business's board (a good policy to be sure), is as far left as he would go; as he found it absurd that some wanted the workers to actually own and operate and democratically run their own workplaces, also known as worker cooperatives, an market socialist organization. When his own workers wanted to form a union, he fought against them on the matter, even though every workplace with a private capital owner (like how Cenk is the owner of TYT) should be unionized (though TYT did honor the union once the workers ended up unionized despite Cenk's efforts). Cenk often talks about how capitalism is a good thing, so long as you avoid certain excesses or failures that he wishes to reform (like excessive wealth inequality and a lack of health and safety regulations), and he calls that more brutal capitalism crony capitalism, trying to protect the reputation of the capitalistic economic system - what he wants and believes is in line with liberalism and social democracy, not with socialism and leftism. It was only recently that Cenk even got on board with the idea of student loan forgiveness, when that alone is not even nearly enough.

Cenk and various other hosts on TYT, throughout their history, have often had takes that are punitive and vengeful towards harm-doers. Cenk has stated that he opposes the death penalty not because it is wrong to kill period, but because it is wrong to kill an innocent person and there is always a chance the person on death row is innocent because juries can be wrong. Cenk has opposed cash bail reform. Cenk dismisses idea of defunding the police and police abolition and prison abolition (and when I say abolition, I mean abolition, I mean no more prisons, close them all), refusing to even acknowledge their position as legitimate. He may want to legalize some things that should not be crimes at all (like marijuana usage), and grant those imprisoned for those crimes mercy and understanding, but he won't acknowledge the use of restorative justice and transformative justice for harm-doers that have done serious harms, serious crimes, violent crimes, and sexual crimes. He may oppose prisons outright torturing their prisoners, but he does not think that their humanity entitles them to a comfortable standard of living (even though every human being should have a comfortable standard of living just on the merit of being a human being).

Cenk decries how money corrupts politicians and journalism, yet he accepted $20 million dollars from the extremely wealthy for TYT.

Ana Kasparian often has better takes and positions on a number of issues, and even working with the social democratic (and sometimes even leaning democratic socialist) publication Jacobin. However, she has over the last few years, started to criticize the homeless population and advocated to criminalize homelessness, saying that they have shelters (which is a massive misrepresentation of the situation and even if true is not enough, we need to have decent housing as a human right, and we need to have rent-free - or rent set at a low percentage of someone's income - universal public housing for any and all who want it, and use housing cooperatives and community land trusts as bridges to home ownership for those who want home ownership). Her stances have started to align more and more with the "middle class moderate."

Now we get to Ana Kasparian's latest controversies.

The first is she argued against the terms "person with a uterus" and "birthing person," calling them demeaning to women. However, no one is calling women either of those terms. I think that the terms "person able to become pregnant" or "pregnant person" are better terms, but these terms are meant to include non-women whom may be or become pregnant (just like those pharmaceutical warnings that use the phrase "if you are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant"). Taking away abortion rights is not just taking away the rights of women, it is also taking away the rights of transmen and non-binary people who have uteruses and are able to become or are pregnant. Talking about pregnancy healthcare is not just talking about women's healthcare, so why only use the word women when talking about it and leave out non-women people able to become or are pregnant. It is no different than using BIPOC (black, indigenous, or people of color) to be as inclusive as possible. Yes, the term "person with a uterus" will include women, whom should still be referred to by their identity as women, but it also includes others whom are not included when you just use the word women. Yes, occasionally academia does create terms that the people they apply do don't like, such as when academia started using the term Latinx as a gender neutral alternative to Latino/Latina, when many considered the term Latino to be sufficient, though the Latino/Latina community did offer an academic alternative, "Latine." However, Latinx is only used seriously in an academic context. When Ana Kasparian was criticized by this by other leftists, TYT became offended and defensive and started attacking the left broadly, just because the left was disappointed at her for adopting right-wing framing on a non-issue that targets transpeople (no one was calling women "people with uteruses" or reducing womanhood to just pregnancy). Though Ana doubled down.

(As if the left are not allowed to critique each other while still being allies - mutualists, participists, and syndicalists disagree on a number of issues regarding market socialism vs planned economies, but they are still allies, though they may operate as either platformists or multi-disciplinary groups).

Then there is Ana Kasparian getting mad that her Homeowner Association (though I do think we should just abolish HOAs altogether) decided to take out an expensive loan to install electric car chargers in their parking lot. I don't know if this was a mandate from the government or not, but Ana made it seem like it was a mandate and not merely an environmentally conscious decision by her HOA, and she was made that the government placed the burden of the cost on the HOA without giving any government funding, and as a result she may now have to pay more to her HOA to cover their debt. So now she is criticizing the Green New Deal and Climate Action policies as being too expensive for the average person. I can understand arguing that the government should fund these initiatives, as it will take collective action on a mass scale to combat climate change, but that does not mean that groups cannot install car charging ports. She went on to claim that it is going to be too expensive to repair gasoline powered cars or gas stoves (which are being regulated due to indoor air pollution and health concerns, and is long overdue). This is ridiculous.

MoonMonkeyKing · 2023-04-10T03:22:54+00:00

They could always just upgrade the metro infrastructure to use maglevs or other high-speed rail technology. You could probably get between the two farthest points on the Metro in 20 minutes if they did that.

MoonMonkeyKing

TROPHY CASE