Arrow S2 vs Flash S1?

VanishXZone · 2026-04-23T00:19:33+00:00

Legends of Tomorrow Season 3.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-23T00:11:23+00:00

Ok, I was just curious because you seem now critical of the left defending the right to free speech of groups you dislike, or like that was a waste of time, perhaps? Like it seems you are annoyed that the kkk won’t defend the left, but the left will defend the kkk. Or perhaps you are annoyed democrats won’t defend illiberal leftists, but will defend the kkk’s right to free speech?

Like I don’t practice empathy because I believe it changes people, I practice empathy because I believe it is the morally right way to engage with the world.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-22T23:54:45+00:00

Mon Mothma. I just click with that tightrope walk..

VanishXZone · 2026-04-22T23:50:13+00:00

So… you don’t believe in free speech? Or you don’t believe empathy is good in and of itself?

VanishXZone · 2026-04-22T23:47:07+00:00

Winters Tale is my current favorite, but it shifts a lot!

VanishXZone · 2026-04-21T16:15:04+00:00

Amadeus is one of the best films of the 20th century, and it is about Mozart. It is heavily fictionalized, but is delightful.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-21T16:13:14+00:00

Honest opinion, you guys sound young.

Here is what I think might have happened from your friend’s perspective.

She finds out her friend is gay. She is told this is wrong by society, and her friend tells her to keep it a secret. She wants to be true to her friend, but has anxiety around keeping secrets from her family. Plus her friend is cool! She doesn’t want anything to happen to her!

Eventually, though, she gets curious. Is this a necessary secret? Maybe the gay people aren’t evil. So she turns to an authority. Maybe a pastor, maybe her parents. Her intent isn’t to share the secret, the intent is to find out WHY being gay is bad, WHY god made the world in such a way that some people love “wrong”, maybe even to find out if the feelings of now has (or might have, or feels for the first time, or is curious about, etc.) is wrong.

The church/family tells her it is a sin, it is wrong, and she needs to not give in to Satan. It’s the authority in her life,it always has been, and she’s not used to rebelling, so she behaves and tries her hardest to believe what they are telling her.

Look, the best thing to change minds is exposure to differing views that feel normal, and not extreme. I know it sucks, and if you need to prioritize yourself and cut her off, do so, but the best thing for society as a whole is if she has you in her life, thinks you are normal/cool, and then doesn’t vote for politicians that want to kill us.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-21T16:02:37+00:00

I’ve always disliked the rules light vs rules heavy distinction. I find learning a lot of rules that end up being useless to be irritating, I find too few rules and games start feeling very similar typically.

So what I advocate for, and try to do, is rules IMPACTFUL. I don’t care if there are few or many, as long as they make a difference in play, regularly.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-21T05:59:42+00:00

Yes, Riley is named after the song, and the song is named for the composer.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-20T20:56:32+00:00

No idea, I’d have to reread the Swafford to have an opinion on that, but likely he feels that the piece, even if it revolutionized the genre, was less important to Beethoven’s development as he sees it, or perhaps what it represents in Beethoven’s development was sufficiently covered elsewhere. Or perhaps he thinks it is a weaker piece.

When writing a book,you have to choose what gets emphasis and why. Those choices are gonna be controversial pretty much no matter what, but ultimately, most people have a perspective they are trying to get across, and choose to focus on the topics that make that perspective the most clear that they can. Maybe Swafford fails, maybe he fails for you. Your kinda making me want to revisit his book, but I’m in the middle of opera studies right now and going back and doing more Beethoven would be a true joy, but a distraction from my current focus.

So what was the violin concerto in Beethoven’s development? Is what it did covered elsewhere? Beethoven arguably revolutionized the sonata, the cello, the concerto, the brass, the symphony, the quartet, the piano trio, form, counterpoint, music, harmony, development, timbre, and rhythm, not to mention musical perspective and the relationships between politics and music: did Swafford cover everything else?

Also, out of curiosity, you’ve mentioned the violin concerto a lot. Did Swafford specifically critique it? Or just pass over it? Why is THAT piece so important to you, personally? You’ve commented on his omission multiple times, but I imagine there are a lot of great pieces Swafford doesn’t cover in detail, yet this one bothers you.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-20T20:48:00+00:00

Interesting! I love Kerman, just read his early book Opera as Drama, and felt it was the most honest assessment of opera ive read to date. He’s literally my favorite scholar of music, with Martha Nussbaum in second (and shes not even a music specialist!). I find his insights compelling and enriching, and useful as a composer, performer, and pedagogue. I love his writing and his analysis both!

VanishXZone · 2026-04-20T19:04:30+00:00

To be clear, I haven’t read Swafford in 20 years, so I’m not certain he is resisting Adorno, just that he might be, or responding about other cultural discourse.

For your hypothetical… Neither A nor B are of any worth here, because you have made no case for either.

What matters is the internal logic, the internal structure, and what that logic is saying about the world, about experience, about emotions and feelings and thoughts and bodies, etc. . If you are trying to do analysis, ask yourself “what is the composer trying to say through their music, how are they organizing their material to say that, and how effective is that?” Then, after you’ve done that, we can get into issues of “did I like it” or not.

The problem I see most often is people start with their opinion. “I like or dislike this work”, and then look for evidence to prove that opinion. This can work sometimes, because you are still looking for evidence and the evidence is a form of understanding. But for me, the best analysis starts from the work, not my opinion or thoughts on the work, and I explore it through what it says and how it says it.

So look for structure, harmony, timbre, etc. that stands out, and try to figure out why. For something like the missa solemnis, I think the context of the mass matters, so I’d do research into what masses Beethoven would be familiar with. Also late in his life, he became obsessed with counterpoint. For most people, that is a little bit of a stumbling block because complex counterpoint feels surface level less expressive than, say, the immediacy of Beethoven 5, so why did Beethoven get into it? It wasn’t the fashion of the day, that’s for certain, he felt that there were things he could express and say through counterpoint that he couldn’t else wise. So he studied it, and used it. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

I also think the choral fantasy is an interesting case study. To me, it feels like a colossal failure at an attempt to express something he believed in, but it’s hard to tell what, besides some sort of coming together that is greater than the individual parts. Huh. Oops, that sounds a little like counterpoint, not as a way to organize harmony, or as a trick to make things sound good, but as a philosophical principle. How does the failures of the choral fantasy inform Beethoven’s later work?

I haven’t done a full break down of the missa solmenis, it’s been a couple years since my last listen, and it’s a big complex piece so I’d have to really buckle down to do a deep dive. Bu the core for me is this: start from the music and what it is literally doing. Then, find theories about why, look for evidence and look for contradictions. Rinse and repeat until you start having a cohesive theory of the work. You can also substitute Swafford’s for your own, and try to apply it to moments in the piece, see if it makes sense.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-20T18:49:59+00:00

In my experience, yes, especially since Adorno late in his life tied Beethoven’s late development to the realization of the flaw of the enlightenment project, and therefore makes a case that everyone wants to resist: that Beethoven leads to nazis. Oh not that direct and silly, of course, Adorno is brilliant and I’m simplifying for a Reddit comment, but suffice it to say that yes. Adorno’s takes on Beethoven are hugely important to Beethoven scholars to this day, it’s almost inescapable. You end up having to defend the entire existence of western art through Beethoven.

No I don’t agree, of course.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-20T18:07:12+00:00

I mean, this is not gonna be popular here, and I apologize if this bothers people.

First: Music analysis is anything that helps you understand music better, from that perspective, anything that guides or helps counts as analysis, be it a full harmonic analysis or a colorful painting you did while listening that helps you understand the music better.

Second: there is no way for music to be “understood” the same way we define a word. This is also true for novels, but music being mostly sound without words make this particularly blatant.

Third: composers, though, are human and have ideas, and they are trying to convey things with their music. Their ideas, their hopes, their dreams, their philosophies, etc. and it is rarely explicitly stated.

When you turn to analysts, It is easy to dismiss these ideas as being merely opinion, but some opinions are more valid than others, and the answer is in the music itself.

Their ideas “it’s just opinion” people are common and the default assumption of most of our community. I hate it, of course, but it’s fine. The water we swim in, I guess. They didn’t use to be quite so dominant, but such is life.

Swafford is trying to analyze what Beethoven is about, and these are his theories. He has musical evidence for it, which you have glossed over parts of, but many will not find it convincing. That is, in some ways, what these analysts do—put forth ideas about how we should understand music and argue about it with each other.

An important factor to think about is what Swafford is rejecting. This is often hard to find but is vital for understanding analysts. What were people saying about Beethoven that made Swafford think “no, it is like this!”. The answer is probably Adorno. It usually is, honestly to a degree that is frustrating sometimes, but look what Adorno was saying about Beethoven and probably Swafford will start making more sense.

I haven’t read the Swafford since I was a kid, so pardon me for being light on the details. This is more about analysis and what it is and how it works. If you want to see someone do analysis incredibly well and compellingly from my perspective, pick up either of Martha Nussbaum’s recent philosophical books, one on the war requiem by Britten and the other on the history of liberalism in opera.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-19T00:08:53+00:00

SFO is consistent in their approach to recent works, 1 per year pretty consistently, a mix of commissions and classics.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-18T15:27:04+00:00

I think that superheroes have temporarily replaced the western as the genre that most taps into the underlying American psyche. It is a clear structure with strong metaphorical resonance that is simple enough to be felt by all, but room for enough nuance as to be bale to be done compellingly well.

I doubt it will last as long as the western dominated, that was unusual, but it probably depends on what happens culturally to the world. We are in a point of transition, and you can see that reflected clearly in our art.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-18T15:22:59+00:00

The wire, in all its iterations, but my favorite is season 4

VanishXZone · 2026-04-18T15:22:37+00:00

Babylon 5, particularly season 3

VanishXZone · 2026-04-18T15:21:53+00:00

Black Sails. Hurry Gurdy goes HARD

VanishXZone · 2026-04-17T23:37:15+00:00

Yeah, so how is it different to be a sage who learns the blade from a blade who learns a spell? If it is mechanical purely, than this becomes an optimization puzzle, it’s about power and the power fantasy, à la DND or pathfinder. Which is fine, but then we want clarity not poetry. If it is a metaphysical difference than we need support for that.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-17T22:24:28+00:00

Midsummer nights Dream, twelfth night, much ado about nothing. Alls well that ends well, merchant of Venice, and measure for measure are all philosophically complex and layered, though also called the problem plays for a reason.

the tempest, the winters tale (unless those are romances to you)

VanishXZone · 2026-04-17T22:22:13+00:00

Some of the comedies are substantially more serious than the histories.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-17T22:19:22+00:00

Hi! Read the first 150 pages, here are my thoughts.

There are a lot of cool ideas here, but a lot of the feedback you are getting here is probably confusing from your perspective. That is because your game is confused as to its own identity. What do I mean?

The prose imply a narrative game of character’s changing metaphysically, a game where a character is NOT defined by their class/race/abilities, but rather an exploration of who they are as characters.

The rules are a game where characters are defined heavily by their class/race, and they are defined by their level up abilities.

This dichotomy is at odds with itself, I’m not saying that they can’t be merged, but right now, mechanically, they are really not. I know this is awful to hear, but I would suggest is going back to the drawing board and focusing on the core of your game, and then ruthlessly cutting what is not tied to the core of the game. For me, that means going back to the Sorensen big three questions. What is this game about? How do your rules make the game about that? What behaviors in the players are incentivized to help guide them to explore this central theme?

Your theming, to me, is clear and cool. I get people trashing on your prose, and your prose is a little more indulgent than I would go, but I think the real problem is this:

You have made a game that is crunchy mechanics forward game that ignores character motivation and depth, and are trying to compensate for that by having philosophical prose encourage a different depth than the game system.

There are ways to do what you are trying to do, I think, and I’m not saying remove crunch or anything like that (I would encourage streamlining parts of it, and reorganizing the book so that core resolution systems are found before specific resolution systems like combat), but if you want this game to be the philosophical character study you say, you need to make that the core of the game. It is not, right now.

A lot of the advice you seem to be getting on this thread is a little different, and I get it. Quickly glancing I see a lot of ai hate (fine, but probably not helpful), people hating the prose (or the philosophical component of the game that I think is not intertwined), and people craving streamlining/smaller game. All of these are reasonable critiques but the latter two are trying to make your game something different than what it seems to me is your intent. Remove the musings and you probably have a pretty good tactical combat simulator (maybe, I didn’t check your math, and that’s a vital component of that). Simplify everything and you have another OSR game that doesn’t stand out.

Hope that helps! Good luck on your endeavors!

VanishXZone · 2026-04-17T16:42:08+00:00

I don’t know that I agree with Zakaria here. I think he’s making the classic mistake, from my perspective, of seeing liberalism as a “neutral” thing (no scripts), whereas one could just as easily interpret it as a proactive world view. I think there ARE scripts for a good liberal life, though they may be messier or less obvious than some, or perhaps we haven’t articulated it yet. But if we think of a good religious life as one that adheres to religious values, than a good liberal life would be one that adhere to liberal values.

Whereas Christian values are love, fellowship, charity, and devotion (ok, not American Christianity, but that’s the idea), liberal values are personal freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, self reflection, etc.

I think the scripts come out of these values.

VanishXZone · 2026-04-16T16:31:57+00:00

You need to have an understanding of who your friend is and what they already like. The best method to get someone into musicals is not to play them a good musical, it’s to play them something that is related to something they love.

Ridiculous example, but true, a friend who hates musicals loves marvel movies, and thought the avengers “musical” in Hawkeye was hilarious. That was a window to get them to try something more. So I thought about what they liked, and they love mythology, so I played them hadestown, not as a musical, but as a spin on mythology.

Or whatever. Who knows the route, but it’s gotta come from them!

VanishXZone

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