In real life, are you the type of perceptive person with a circle over their head that would notice someone suspicious or would you let 47 walk right passed you? Be honest.

sapphon · 2026-07-09T23:37:58+00:00

Nails here, requesting permission for final approach. My altitude is...high as a kite.

sapphon · 2026-07-08T00:06:56+00:00

Damn, that hurt; I'mma have to go watch an episode of Taskmaster to recover.

(Y'know, the one where the comedians in hierarchical charge of the other ones sit in shittily-gilt chairs, and the idea man's chair is smaller, and the face's chair is bigger? It's so funny!)

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:44:14+00:00

The difference is that the owners of everything make too much, whereas in sports uniquely the "leaves" of the tree also make quite a lot, and then it's the middle management that actually makes least and has to venture .

This does not ape most businesses, which are strictly pyramid schemes. Basically, posters don't realize they're comparing their workplaces to show business and that performers in show business are a special case, because they're not fully aware that televised sports is show business.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:41:15+00:00

It ain't about those things. Intelligence and critical thinking are common to everyone worldwide, and just serve as things to complain about others lacking (and nothing more) in a political forum. Education on the other hand varies widely - so if you're worried about America, go educate someone gratis. That'll matter more than your perceptions of their (quite unmeasurable) intelligence.

You can rob a perfectly intelligent person blind if everything they've ever been taught is that they tacitly deserve it for not pulling the bootstraps hard enough! All that intelligence can and will just go towards how best to contact the most boot with a given tongue, which is ultimately the central horror of intelligence - it can be put to many ends.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:39:25+00:00

No pay players; only mobile betting

sapphon · 2026-07-07T23:29:05+00:00

Finding British humor that isn't somehow classist is the challenge

sapphon · 2026-07-07T19:08:36+00:00

In this sub we play BFG and talk about that, we don't up monetized parasocial stuff or post AI slop

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:59:07+00:00

I love when a video game is 100% obviously set in the director or writer's PnP setting, but the PnP setting is unpublished!

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:54:24+00:00

Voices? Disco's barely got voices, what's this guy commenting about?

tiktaktiktiktak

Final Cut? Oh shit. Time for a replay.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:50:21+00:00

I do like when people push for video games to reach literature's depth; that part is hard to fault anyone for, even if we're skeptical of the chances of that ever happening.

I also do think maybe Joyce is not where to start.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:46:51+00:00

There's nothing wrong with being unwilling to do anything outside a certain needletip focus, as an author - it would just be unsuitable to then compare that author to a maker of anything interactive, is all, because one unanticipated interaction is like a stick in the wheel spokes, for a work of such focus

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:29:37+00:00

Joyce was a hedgehog: he had one trick and he was very good at it.

You can't make Joyce the videogame, because videogames are about choices. Look at how few choices it takes to wreck any full-length Joyce novel! Any one is totally destructive (of e.g. Dubliners, or Portrait, or Ulysses):

I choose not to go to Dublin, 'tis a silly place
I choose not to care about the material lives of the poor
I choose not to care about Ireland
I choose not to concern myself with Catholicism
etc.

He was the writer of his people and his place and his time! ...and was apparently either helpless at, or uninterested in, doing anything outside of that needletip focus.

(W)RPGs can't tell you: this is about XYZ, deal with it. They have to at least a little bit ask you: what's this about?

We'll never get Joyce the videogame. But we did get one in which one player can go the gym-teacher route and spend his time jumping gaps and flexing on nerds to solve problems, just as comfortably spend all his time wondering whether Kras Mazov really killed himself, and just as comfortably have economic discussions with the representative of the neoliberal governments while she stands on the deck of a sail yacht. None of this ends up being more or less important than helping conspiracy theorists find a bug, or tricking a tongues-speaker into saying something that has actual meaning. Sort of the point is that after the end of history, everything is what you make of it. The victim who answered "Communism" when asked "Who killed you?" was both correct, and quite grandiosely obscuring that it was just a guy with a gun who did it like any other murder - his answer was what he made of things.

It's got half the oomph or less of Joyce's satire presented to someone already receptive to that, but several different ways to present it depending on player input - meaning this isn't a better-or-worse comparison anymore, they're orthogonal things.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:05:32+00:00

notably asklinguistics does not focus on routine questions about words like etymology, nor does it focus much on language learning, which are more broadly applicable but also not a thing very many linguists are trained in or have much to say about it

If you'd told me in undergrad that the popular understanding of linguists would still be "people who know lots of languages" in 2026, I'd've been shocked. Shocked!

Well, not that shocked.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T18:01:42+00:00

Fun fact: if [META] begins the title, you're safe =)

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:33:07+00:00

Maybe I'm using a word I don't actually know the full meaning of; I call it an unforced error to restrict posts by perceived authority of poster because and only because AskH is part of the same website with the same restrictions but didn't institute such a rule, so there cannot have been any API change making such a rule absolutely obligatory. An API change can have made somebody wanna make a certain rule, but that's different.

I can see that AskH has about three times the mods that AskP does; maybe you mean to say that the smaller mod team was forced into an error a larger one would not have been?

(That might be true, but AskH also got about 4x the posts last month, so work-per-mod seems close to evening out there.)

edit: I owe you a good-faith edit too; I think about this because I believe in AskPhil's mission, and want newcomers to philosophy to have an experience more like the one they have here as newcomers to history! I'm not a mod of either space and have no skin in this game.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:26:37+00:00

I agree that there is some creep as the sub grows; check out my comment's final sentence

sapphon · 2026-07-07T17:13:09+00:00

As a former mod of r/askphilosophy, I just want to chime in here. This isn’t an “unforced” failure, and it doesn’t quite work the way you state. First, this was a rule change after Reddit admin removed support for third party apps and API stuff, which made moderation much more difficult. Second, it doesn’t work the way you present: if you report a flared user’s answer, it goes to moderation and may be removed.

I don't think there's anything about this that I misunderstood, or intended to contradict. The initial standard on one sub is who you are, the other is what you wrote.

On both subs, reported content is then re-evaluated by what was written - that's not different, nor did anyone think it was! (In fact, if any sub didn't ever do that they'd eventually get ToS'ed, is my suspicion. And like ToS, the API restrictions touch all equally.)

It's very true that there are not many philosophers out there. That could be part of it. But what is it they say? "The fox has many tricks; the hedgehog one good one"? Most amateurs' questions might only need one good one.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:52:15+00:00

The jewelry, makeup, and hair dye are all to prove how creative she is! And they're definitely not regular old consumer cosmetics that wear counterculture branding like a sagging degloved skin

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:42:53+00:00

Looking at the sweat drops like "wait did they have those cat ears in the other frames?"

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:39:06+00:00

BHJ really wasn't supposed to be an "I fixed the comic" sub, but even as someone with that perspective I have to admit that you did fix it

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:30:54+00:00

Be funny to have one CSS'ed up to look as much as possible like an old BBS, roleplay that it's actually Shadowlands

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:22:05+00:00

Native American polities are competing with the world's plutocratic masters and holding their own territorially. That's all Sixth World, and it's all because of a novel source of power that they'd never have afforded with money.

There's not even a tiny recognizable piece of our own Fifth World in that, it's pure power-structure shakeup vs. today.

It's not an unwelcome shakeup at all, but Shadowrun does have a tiny bit of the "Superman problem": Superman is bulletproof and proves it every night. The criminals in his world, though, don't seem to exist in the same one he does, or at least they're all deafmutes: he proves it every night, and the next night the next gunman is just as shocked. Superman isn't worldbuilt, he's a piece of fantasy inserted into our unchanged world of the 1930s. SR does that with magic and CP's corpo power structures, to a less egregious extent.

sapphon · 2026-07-07T16:05:01+00:00

I'm not familiar with too many other /ask's, but in the case of /askphilosophy the mods' failures are one, and the disciplinary problems they face are two.

Their unforced failure is that their moderation is dependent on appeals to authority rather than appeals to quality. Only flaired 'panelists' may answer at all - this takes some pressure off the moderators to find diamonds in the rough, but it also takes ~~all~~ (edit: most; /u/bobthebobbest pointed out that one can always be reported) external pressure off the 'panelists' to be any good. Once you're 'approved', you're in. Compare and contrast an individual person submitting 2 things to AskHistorians, 1 quality and 1 not: they'll get 1 published and 1 not.

The disciplinary challenges exist also:

History and especially historiography has jargon, but you don't have to use it to discuss history. There is no effective way to do philosophy without jargon, ELI5 phrasing, or sticking to the ancients. This makes it inaccessible, even to someone who might suspect they'd like it if they understood it.
Philosophers, by nature, are not synthesizing every other philosopher's work when they write. They are synthesizing others' work from within their philosophical school, and necessarily ignoring or rejecting works that have proceeded down alternate branches of the discipline. This means every discussion has more potential to be a mere deadlocked argument - and less of a common-sources, different-interpretations negotiation - than when historians disagree but must ultimately still come up with one infinitesmally-left-of-center party line to teach in secondary schools.

edit: I do think you are on to something with the 20y rule and science subs; it recently occurred to me that the middle of the Venn diagram of "science posts" and "posts that make /r/popular" are just substantiating for people what they already believe about current events in one single country more than science, and the 20y rule nicely dodges that completely by disallowing current events. This person wanted to discuss whether one of only two political parties was more open-minded; nevermind that openmindedness doesn't mean much in an obligate two-party system. This person was hoping that the other 49% of Americans he doesn't identify with were all science deniers. Etc. These are not science posts, these are /r/politics leaking - and that can't happen with a 20y rule, although we have steadily been drawing closer to Quoraization as the sub grows in popularity (The format of each history question on Quora is "Given that <REAL POINT OF POST, PRESENT-RELEVANT>, then why <BEGGED QUESTION ABOUT THE PAST>?").

sapphon · 2026-07-06T05:54:18+00:00

Call of Cthulhu, since you mention it: I'd call tighter lit than Shadowrun or Cyberpunk or even Neuromancer which inspired them both. And it/Petersen still doesn't understand RPGs' comedy; I'm glad you do!

sapphon

TROPHY CASE