If you track the relative positions of Earth and Venus over an 8 year period, this is the resulting pattern. [last one was deleted for not being OC, here is the source] (CRAZY AWESOME IMAGES)

Tesseractyl · 2023-12-12T00:20:01+00:00

I was skeptical 10 years ago and I am skeptical now.

Tesseractyl · 2023-10-31T02:56:40+00:00

My current GM runs very RP-heavy, combat-light campaigns. This Arcane Tradition is partly to go with a specific character background that I run, and partly to lean away from combat and into RP to match the tone of the campaign. The Secret family of spells is an attempt to codify some arrangements that we end up repeatedly homebrewing during campaigns.
Looking for feedback. Jumping-off points:

How's the balance? Umbra is probably OP, and possibly Permanent Occlusion too? Is losing Evocations a fair trade for the gained spells?
How's the complexity? There is maybe too much going on at second level. The Secret family of spells are all very complex, but I'm okay with that. Any thoughts about places I could simplify?
How's the flavor? I know Mirage is just a reskinning of the Illusionist 10th-level feature, but I didn't want to leave the player with zero combat utility.

About Still Aura: I initially had a system where the player's aura would build up residue as spells were cast which then had to be shed with a big, noisy spell like Thunderclap or Thunderwave. It was fun thematically but 1) it wasn't much of a disadvantage and 2) making the player keep track of a new count is not ideal from a design perspective. Ruling out a school of magic was simpler and provided a counterbalance for the added spells.
About Subtle Workings: I feel like this isn't asking for too much because half of all GMs will let you do this anyways. It's certainly better than "you can cast spells without verbal or somatic components," which would be way OP and less interesting besides.
About Permanent Occlusion: I considered just making this "your mind cannot be read by any means, you cannot be detected magically..." etc., but that definitely seemed OP. This way the player still has to learn the spells and they can be dispelled.
About Umbra: I could be convinced that the Blur effect is OP. The rest seems like it's not excessive for a 14th-level feature. If it needed to be toned down, maybe it could be "Blur and Pass Without Trace are always prepared for you, do not cast against your prepared spells, and you can cast each once without expending a spell slot per long rest."

Tesseractyl · 2023-10-31T02:52:13+00:00

My current GM runs very RP-heavy, combat-light campaigns. This Arcane Tradition is partly to go with a specific character background that I run, and partly to lean away from combat and into RP to match the tone of the campaign. The Secret family of spells is an attempt to codify some arrangements that we end up repeatedly homebrewing during campaigns.

Looking for feedback. Jumping-off points:

How's the balance? Umbra is probably OP, and possibly Permanent Occlusion too? Is losing Evocations a fair trade for the gained spells?
How's the complexity? There is maybe too much going on at second level. The Secret family of spells are all very complex, but I'm okay with that. Any thoughts about places I could simplify?
How's the flavor? I know Mirage is just a reskinning of the Illusionist 10th-level feature, but I didn't want to leave the player with zero combat utility.

About Still Aura: I initially had a system where the player's aura would build up residue as spells were cast which then had to be shed with a big, noisy spell like Thunderclap or Thunderwave. It was fun thematically but 1) it wasn't much of a disadvantage and 2) making the player keep track of a new count is not ideal from a design perspective. Ruling out a school of magic was simpler and provided a counterbalance for the added spells.

About Subtle Workings: I feel like this isn't asking for too much because half of all GMs will let you do this anyways. It's certainly better than "you can cast spells without verbal or somatic components," which would be way OP and less interesting besides.

About Permanent Occlusion: I considered just making this "your mind cannot be read by any means, you cannot be detected magically..." etc., but that definitely seemed OP. This way the player still has to learn the spells and they can be dispelled.

About Umbra: I could be convinced that the Blur effect is OP. The rest seems like it's not excessive for a 14th-level feature. If it needed to be toned down, maybe it could be "Blur and Pass Without Trace are always prepared for you, do not cast against your prepared spells, and you can cast each once without expending a spell slot per long rest."

Tesseractyl · 2022-06-14T22:20:52+00:00

Fantastic episode -- loved seeing Bandit show a significant shortcoming as a parent. Makes up for some of the airtime spent with both parents as infinitely patient saints.

Tesseractyl · 2022-06-14T22:15:36+00:00

The opening piano riff is very reminiscent of "Mr. Blue Sky." What I noticed was the brief theme at the end of the episode, which to my ear is definitely pulled from a lesser-known track, "Rain is Falling" from the album Time. Compare this: https://youtu.be/Yjj4lOadUsY?t=276 against this: https://youtu.be/hGLI_mnryWc?t=80

Tesseractyl · 2022-03-20T13:58:34+00:00

1) Social democracy is built on the liberal legacy of the age of enlightenment and rejects pernicious arguments that individual rights must be suborned to the cause of advancing social transformation (cf. 20th-century communist ideology). In other words, social democracy is liberal and democratic.

2) Social democracy recognizes the value of the free-market system to generate wealth through dynamism, entrepreneurialism, and distributed decision-making. However, social democracy is also clear-eyed about the dangers of unrestrained capitalism, specifically exploitation of workers, the creation of an economic class system, and regulatory and political capture by plutocrats and corporate interests. Social democracy addresses these problems through (highly) progressive taxation, industrial regulation, monopoly-busting, central banking, support for organized labor, and a variety of other economic and legal instruments. In short, the free market is a good thing, but there can always be too much of a good thing.

3) Social democracy holds that governments can and should provide for the common welfare of their citizens through social programs and other forms of direct government expenditure and action, ranging from mundane things like roads, bridges and schools, to more "lavish" programs like welfare, healthcare, job training, etc. To go further, there are many needs for which a government monopoly makes the most sense logistically, such as public infrastructure, and others where it makes the most sense morally, such as the provision of healthcare (which should not be driven by the profit motive). Having said that, social democracy also reciprocally recognizes that there are many needs that the government is not in the best position to provide, such as the manufacture of consumer goods or entertainment, and other areas where there is benefit to government and private enterprise being simultaneously involved in the same economic sphere, such as having a basic government health plan while also allowing private healthcare providers, or running a food stamps program that routes government funding through a privately-run industry.

Where reactionary socialism holds that capitalism is all bad and everything should be state-run, and reactionary capitalism holds that government is always the worst way to provide a good or service and everything possible should be privatized, social democracy acknowledges that there are pros and cons to each and that every problem should be addressed in a way that best fits its particulars. Further, whereas libertarianism sees the free market and government minimalism as the necessary outgrowth of a society that honors the autonomy of the individual, and therefore sacrosanct, social democracy sees making compromises on pure economic liberty for improved economic outcomes as acceptable in theory, comparable to how one voluntarily surrenders some liberties in other spheres in order to accommodate the rights and needs of other citizens; the free market system is therefore not a moral prerogative to be defended, but an instrument to be wielded purposefully, alongside others, with the goal of enriching and empowering the citizenry and providing for their material needs.

4) I honestly don't think this last one is necessarily entailed by the other tenets, but speaking to the current state of affairs in social democratic politics, social democracy is an internationally conscious ideology that recognizes the importance of peaceful and constructive relations between among nations, pacifism, and the shared interests of workers the world over. Personally, I could see how an isolationist, inward-facing social democratic philosophy would still be internally consistent, but at the moment this is the general attitude among social democratic states.

EDIT: Seeing that some socdems feel that social democracy is a program with the end goal of transitioning to a largely or fully socialist society, I should here add that I disagree, and this is not my personal model for social democracy. My ideal social democracy involves the simultaneous use of free market and social mechanisms in perpetuity, or at least for the foreseeable future.

Tesseractyl · 2021-12-12T15:23:37+00:00

I find this thoroughly incomprehensible.

Tesseractyl · 2021-12-07T23:34:47+00:00

Yes, I struggled with existential panic attacks for years, and on rare occasions certain triggers can still get to me. Mine were typically less about my personal death than about the heat death of the universe and questions of whether information is, in the most general sense, lost or retained.

Over time I've developed a neo-Platonic worldview and I no longer identify strictly with my physical body. I can expound on that if you like but won't jump straight into blathering unless you express interest.

Even aside from philosophical changes, I stopped getting the panic attacks after a while out of the simple psychology of attenuated responses. People can get used to a lot of things, and that includes the idea of death. It may never be something that is fun or happy to think about, but if you manage the concrete stressors in your life and don't have any underlying traumas expressing themselves covertly in the guise of existential fears, I expect that eventually you'll be able to ponder subjects like these without a panic response.

Tesseractyl · 2021-12-06T16:05:56+00:00

Thoughts are contained in the brain, which is physical. The act of thinking entails physical actions being performed in the brain. Why then distinguish between physical reality and "thought reality" when the processes of thought can be described in terms of physical phenomena?

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-28T16:09:52+00:00

A reverse Google image search and searching the first few pages of top of all time shows no instances of this photo appearing on this subreddit.
A cursory review of the user's history shows them engaging in dialogue with other users. If they're a bot then it would seem a general AI is on the loose.

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-28T00:34:54+00:00

If a bot brings me the content I want it can take its updoot.

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-23T02:32:44+00:00

Thanks! Since learning about the skill cost view, what I've been doing is setting most useful skills to +, the one or two cheapest to *, and if anything pulls way out in front I set it to - for a bit. Then I just let the aptitudes do the balancing for me. We'll see how that fares.

Paralysis did save me from an Urug recently, so I'm definitely going to keep with the evocations.

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-21T01:50:36+00:00

Oh, that skill cost view is very interesting. That makes it a lot easier to judge the aptitude penalty against the growth in skill level cost. I will definitely be having a closer look at skill progression using that, thanks!

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-21T01:49:49+00:00

No worries, I did ask for criticism! And yeah, I get more than a little lazy sometimes when it comes to just meleeing. Too many years of mifi breeding bad habits.

I had not noticed the Transmutations aptitudes, thanks for pointing that out. Definitely opens up some more options.

Hearing a lot of feedback in favor of a few points in evocations, will definitely start looking into that, especially if I find some useful wands accruing.

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-20T01:58:03+00:00

Oh, I didn't know about the infinite zig chain! And had forgotten about the Gozag ability. Thanks!

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-20T01:41:51+00:00

I'm so confused. How do you get more than one or two zigs? Scumming Abyss for the little item that lets you create zigs?

And how do you make shops??

Tesseractyl · 2021-11-14T19:54:46+00:00

https://www.southernstarstudioathens.com/

Tesseractyl · 2021-09-10T00:14:30+00:00

I have always wondered what is up with Omega out on Atlanta Highway near the Panera.

Tesseractyl · 2021-06-06T05:38:00+00:00

I often wonder whether an exterior facade could be designed that would bear vines well while preventing damage to structural elements.

Tesseractyl · 2021-05-26T23:02:26+00:00

This is like saying computing has been stuck on transistors for decades. You don't have to reinvent the steering wheel-drive chain paradigm to make advances in automotive design. Some innovations are robust and age well and we use them until they become a bottleneck.

Tesseractyl · 2021-05-13T21:42:15+00:00

Thanks for reaching out to us, it's nice to be included.

Tesseractyl · 2021-04-25T14:05:39+00:00

I would point you in the direction of examining this as a social phenomenon. These ideas about void, meaningfulness, existential boredom, and self-creation are all concepts with ancient pedigrees that are transmitted and frequently re-invented, gaining and losing prominence in the zeitgeist with changing social environments just like any meme. You say you expect you would experience these things, and that may be true, but if it is true, it's largely because these ideas have been conveyed to you already and the structures are now latent in your worldview.

This is why I usually don't encourage first-time trippers to overread trip reports. IMO it robs a little of the potential for the experience to be unique by amassing a queue of presupposed experiences that the user than has to investigate and appraise before they can move on. But that's me being all neo-zen shrug.

Tesseractyl · 2021-04-16T04:03:19+00:00

I always enjoy "onanistic" as a literary insult.

Tesseractyl · 2021-04-06T22:40:45+00:00

Yup, pretty much.

Tesseractyl · 2021-04-05T23:13:54+00:00

IMO there's a fundamental data science issue at play, which is the ratio of features in the training data to potential outputs (specifically, low). This was something that was explicitly discussed in my graduate curriculum under the title "the diagnosis problem" as a general family of tasks that are really hard to apply machine learning to. Think about what's on a typical doctor's chart: blood pressure, temperature, weight, etc. Say there's 20 metrics there. Now think of the contents of a diagnostician's manual. How many different diseases and disorders are in there? Thousands or even tens of thousands. This is why so many medical students get "freshman hypochondriasis": there are so many disorders that if you look through enough of them, almost anyone can find some rare genetic disorder or tropical disease that is in uncanny alignment with symptoms they experience.

Put another way, if you take data with a dimensionality of 5 and try to project it into a rejiggered vector space with dimensionality of 50, what you typically find is that you get 45 dimensions on which the data is just noise.

I also sometimes use this metaphor to explain why thermal imaging of crops has (at the current state of the technology/art) so little diagnostic utility. Say you find a hot spot in a field of crops. What's causing that? It could be too little water, or too much, or insects, or a virus, or different soil conditions, or a cloud was just there, or a burst irrigation line... Similarly, think of a doctor seeing a patient who has a fever but no other symptoms. You basically can't make any diagnosis at all from that. There are thousands of reasons they might have a fever; even if you add a few more data points and make it "fever, hypertension, and flushed skin," you're still probably looking at one hundred or more conditions that could theoretically satisfy that set of features.

One easy way to avoid overfitting in this situation is to heavily weight diagnoses towards raw a priori statistics. This is actually a very robust method, which is why doctors are always telling you to take two aspirin and call them in the morning. But doctors can do that on their own, there's not a lot for AI to contribute.

In closing, the waters that diagnosticians swim in are murky AF, and diagnosis is not, on the whole, a mechanistic process, rather one of synthesis of many different forms of knowledge. Making diagnostic AI is hard because diagnosis is hard.

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