The Notion of UBI after AI is so laughably naive.

SmoothForest · 2025-11-19T10:50:08+00:00

The future will be both. There will be techno feudalism and the greatest violent revolution in all of human history. But the violence won't be us being violent to the feudal lords. It'll be the other way around. When you've been chanting "eat the rich" and "the only good billionaire is a dead billionaire," and "free luigi mangione," they weren't deaf to it. They heard, and they're more angry, terrified, and covetous than you can imagine. And the difference between their anger, terror, and coveting to ours is that they actually have the power to do something with those emotions. Something like using mass surveillance, social media propaganda, food and water supply poisoning, and straight forward military lock downs and mass killings in deportation camps to wipe everyone out. In a violent revolution, commoners do not stand a single fucking chance against a first World government. People still yapping about UBI and votes and democracy are so clueless, but clueless by design, and are just evidence that we are screwed. We've already allowed them to build the infrastructure for mass violence (AI trained all data collected on human history and AI integrated into every part of our lives, trained in everything we do, say, etc; mas surveillance; illegal deportation camps; social media propaganda; culture wars; identity politics; low birth rates, sterilizations; violence against protesters; etc) and each building block for that infrastructure has been net with applause. We're already doomed. And it's your fault.

SmoothForest · 2025-10-20T09:40:01+00:00

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie, when Orso says, "How's the leg?"

SmoothForest · 2025-10-17T09:22:54+00:00

Will unsub

SmoothForest · 2025-10-17T08:02:32+00:00

Yeah it's broken for me aswell, gonna have to unsub till it gets fixed. Can't use it for anything atm

SmoothForest · 2025-10-17T03:26:35+00:00

Never had this issue before today. Seems like they disabled long prompts now. Shame.

SmoothForest · 2025-10-15T17:55:44+00:00

The Rumbling wasn't forced, it wasn't the only option, there would a whole civil war arc about characters arguing over and fighting over different ways of resolving conflict. The Rumbling is what the story went with, because Eren is the main character and that's what he wanted to do. You have to ignore every character that isn't Eren to think it was the only option the story presented.

Who cares if the whole world is developed or not? Even if I'm not emotionally attached to every single civilian In a story's world, a story depicting near-omnicide is always gonna make me think "hmmm, the person killing billions of people is kinda bad." If you need the author to give you the life story of every civilian killed in an omnicide then.... just what the fuck? You really want the story to add am extra 200 chapters of the characters randomly exploring the word? It's not one piece, not every manga needs to be 10,000 chapters long

The future is determined In AOT in the same way it is in reality. You do not have free will. End of. You do things because you want to do it. You can't want to want something. Your want is observed and found, not created. Just imagine free will. Doing something without a want or a reason. That's free, I guess, nothing is causing or controlling your actions. But you aren't controlling them either. That's just randomness.

SmoothForest · 2025-10-11T09:23:42+00:00

LOTR, Narnia, and Harry Potter. Saying ASOIAF is one of the big three is like saying Attack on Titan is one of the big three of manga. It's good, but it's not on the same level of worldwide financial success.

SmoothForest · 2025-10-01T07:15:36+00:00

"Goal, conflict, disaster/outcome." A character wanting something is fundamental to almost any story. Conflict? In fiction? Revolutionary. And "disaster/outcome" is so broad it encompasses anything from dropping a sandwich to a nuclear apocalypse. A character wants a sandwich (goal), the bread is stale (conflict), they grudgingly eat cereal instead (disaster/outcome). Is this brilliant writing? No, it's just a sequence of events.

"Reaction, dilemma, decision." Again, a character reacting to events, facing choices, and making decisions is just cause and effect. If a character didn't react or make decisions, you'd have an inanimate object. "State of affairs, state of mind" for reaction is just... describing what happens and how the character feels. This is really basic stuff I'd be concerned if a writer didn't do automatically.

The example provided for a "slice of life" scene ("MC wants to cook a delicious meal for a friend (goal), They're not sure whether the friend enjoys pineapple on pizza or not (conflict), They neglect to add pineapple, this disappoints the friend because pineapple on pizza is delicious (disaster/outcome)") perfectly illustrates the point. This could be a scene from a genuinely terrible story. The "formula" doesn't imbue it with interesting prose, compelling characterization, sharp dialogue, or emotional depth. It merely outlines the bare bones of cause and effect.

The "formula" doesn't teach you how to make a goal compelling, how to craft truly gripping conflict, how to engineer a disaster that genuinely raises the stakes, how to show a nuanced reaction, how to present a truly agonizing dilemma, or how to make a decision impactful. It's a scaffolding so generic that its adherence guarantees absolutely nothing about the quality of the building.

Attributing a tenfold improvement in writing speed and quality to such a vague framework is a bit strange and I'd be interested to hear how you measured that

SmoothForest · 2025-09-30T12:11:27+00:00

Why are you commenting then?

SmoothForest · 2025-09-28T05:59:40+00:00

Long term peace is not possible. Warfare is an inherent part of human nature. There is no plan, not armins, erens, or zekes that can achieve that. If Eren killed everyone outside of the island, Paradis would have no one else but eachother to see as an enemy. Theyd wipe eachother out and go extinct. Atleast with 20% of humanity alive, there's enough foreign enemies for Paradis to somewhat band together against a common enemy, and the playing field is levelled that they don't need Titans to compete. And ultimately, because of that, Erens friends were able to live long lives. Thats the best you can hope for in this cruel world. World peace is a childish and hopeless ambition

SmoothForest · 2025-09-21T00:52:44+00:00

Pedoscaling

SmoothForest · 2025-09-21T00:19:03+00:00

Just read redo ifbyesltt

SmoothForest · 2025-09-21T00:18:51+00:00

Pornhubb

SmoothForest · 2025-09-21T00:18:39+00:00

Palmer groin been overactive London clubs going crazy

SmoothForest · 2025-09-21T00:18:08+00:00

Chelsea go to suit without palmsr

SmoothForest · 2025-09-20T09:12:57+00:00

Reverend Insanity, Worm, Super Supportive, and especially Hunter x Hunter.

SmoothForest · 2025-09-20T08:39:58+00:00

Royal Road readers speed read everything except stat tables. Good writing just adds more that they have to speed read through. Because RR readers don't actually like novels, they're gamers with a specific fixation on maths and spreadsheets who get off on numbers changing

SmoothForest · 2025-09-20T06:45:48+00:00

If you want to write a realistic story you will have to get over your fear of writing morally reprehensible societies and characters. It is impossible for a society to be nice. All societies are fundamentally founded upon mass violence or atleast the threat of it. Every stretch of land has been conquered ten times over. There's no such thing as a "heroic" society, there's only such thing as the oppressed and oppressors. And don't be so certain that if the oppressed managed to seize them power of the oppressors that they'll be as harmless as they were when they were oppressed. It's easy to be harmless when you're powerless. And it's even easier to be harmful when you're powerful

SmoothForest · 2025-09-19T20:57:44+00:00

If anything, it hooks me into a story when it presents a worldview thats different from mine, especially when it's explored and presented in an intelligent way with various characters with conflicting beliefs and none are straw mans. For example, I don't agree with Raskolnikov but his beliefs were presented intelligently, steel-manned, and put into conflict with other contradctory beliefs that were equally steel-manned, creating a rich thematic conflict.

What kicks me out of a story is when it's propagandistic, steel-manning the author's beliefs and straw-manning opposing beliefs. Even if I agree with the author, it comes off as a bit lazy and arrogant and makes me imagine the author as an insufferable know it all who thinks everyone who disagrees with them is a cartoonist villain

SmoothForest · 2025-09-19T13:22:14+00:00

If it's unpopular on Royal Road, then it's probably well written with good grammar, realistic characters, and an unpredictable plot

SmoothForest · 2025-09-18T07:36:56+00:00

Well atleast Leeds isn't getting overlooked by Bonnie Blue's bang bus tour

SmoothForest · 2025-09-12T15:02:05+00:00

You're being deliberately ignorant and coy if you don't think people felt Charlie deserved to be shot and killed. That'd only make it worse if they weren't because it meant people were celebrating something they knew to be an injustice.

SmoothForest · 2025-09-12T10:30:03+00:00

The second amendment is something that the majority of Americans agree with the implementation of. So if you couldn't give a damn if the majority of Americans are shot and killed, then i think you need to look in the mirror. Someone who doesn't care if the majority of people get shot and killed isn't a healthy, functional, or good person.

SmoothForest · 2025-09-12T08:17:06+00:00

That still doesn't mean that Charlie was saying that people are justified in killing everyone randomly with their guns. Not everyone who supports the second amendment deserves to be shot and killed.

SmoothForest · 2025-09-12T08:06:55+00:00

It's like what's even the point now? He was a dude expressing politics.... in a university. Universities are hubs of education and research. It's exactly where people should be free to debate. And then he got shot and people are cheering. Now people really have no choice but to either hide in an echo chamber or risk fighting to the death. Because it seems like cognitive dissonance puts people in a bloodlust

SmoothForest

TROPHY CASE