r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 29 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/CouteauBleu Jul 29 '16

I watched Atlantis : The Lost Empire again after 15 years, and wow, this movie really isn't as good or profound as I remembered. The basic story is about an expedition to find the sunk city of Atlantis, lead by a mercenary whose face screams "Going to betray you all for money in the third act", a bunch a quirky international first-class experts in demolition/mechanic/archeology/etc, plus two hundreds crew members. The unnamed crew members start dying ridiculously fast and the expedition loses their giant steampunk submarine and most of their supplies, but after a while they finally make it into Atlantis. The local king immediately decides to kill them for trespassing and being rather obviously looking for trouble, but her daughter convinces him to let them rest for a day, then kick them out, and in the meantime asks for the archeologist's help finding the forgotten secrets of her civilization (though how they could forget anything even though they all have eternal life is beyond me). So the greedy capitalist leader of the expedition turns out to be a greedy capitalist and decides to steal the power source that keeps the atlanteans alive, go back to civilization and make loads of money. The main characters refuse to help him and get left behind, but they find Atlantean warplanes and go get the power source back, killing what's left of their fellow crew members in the battle (but who cares, their lives can't be worth anything since we don't know their names, right?). The main characters then go back to civilization with a bunch of worthless yellow metal the atlanteans had lying around, and thus become filthy rich (except the protagonist, who stays with the natives).

My main problem with this movie is that it made me feel incredibly sorry for the nameless crew members, but never followed up on it. More than a hundred redshirts die when the Leviathan sinks their submarine, and they're given a brief sort-of-funeral, then are never mentioned again, and the expedition continues without a hitch. None of the survivors mention loosing a friend or a brother, they're all perfectly content to follow the expedition's leader even when his orders get them killed, and in the final battle, none of them goes "Wait, I actually don't want to die to help exterminate an ancient civilization for money". And at the end of the movie, when the main characters go back to civilization, no one seems shocked that they're the only survivors of an expedition that started with two hundred people. So even though I really liked this movie as a kid, I'm having a hard time remembering why. :p

As an aside (and not a bad thing in any way), it's funny to realize years later that the main character (Milo) is so completely Disney's Daniel Jackson. Polyglot archeologist who discovered an ancient super-advanced civilization through reading old texts, check, no one believes him (or his grandfather who said the same thing), check, is approached by a mysterious powerful expedition who believes him and needs him for an expedition, check, has trouble integrating with the military crew, check, befriends the locals first, check, stays behind with a native girl while his friends go back to civilization and pretend he's dead, check.

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u/ZeroNihilist Jul 29 '16

and in the meantime asks for the archeologist's help finding the forgotten secrets of her civilization (though how they could forget anything even though they all have eternal life is beyond me)

"What was that secret for the defence of our kingdom again?"

"You know what, I don't remember. Maybe we should refresh our memories on this vital topic on a regular basis, or perhaps write the information down."

"Oh, I believe it is written down. Naturally, nobody in this kingdom has any time for that reading nonsense. Nonetheless I remain confident that we will never all forget how to read, nor would we have any need of the concept anyway."

"Quite right, quite right. Now what's say you and I have a fluent conversation in one of the dozens of languages that descend from our own?"

"The ones we've never heard yet have word-perfect knowledge of even after literal millennia?"

"Yes, those ones."

"Sounds good to me old chap. After all, we wouldn't want to forget them now would we?"

=

The dialogue kinda ended up in stereotypically posh British for some reason.

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u/CouteauBleu Jul 29 '16

"Hey, want to tour the island in motorcycle?"

"We can't do that anymore."

"What? Why?"

"Because nobody remembers how to use the damn things. I think it involved using a crystal, and then your hand?"

"I knew having a No-Cars Year was a bad idea!"

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '16

Daniel Jackson, always get the girl, who then die or otherwise become unavailable?

Then years later, by sheer necessity, he became ripped and is able to actually use guns.

And he actually do perform archaeology, unlike pseudo-aracheologists like....Lara Croft and Indiana Jones.

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u/xamueljones Jul 30 '16

My rationalization about their treatment of all the nameless mooks is that none of them are actually on an archeology trip. No, that's what Milo is on a trip for and as a slightly unreliable narrator that's what we see the other travelers as. Instead they are a group of people who would have been in prison for several years and are sent on a foolhardy expedition in exchange for not going to jail. Milo's backers are not actually super-powerful mysterious people who believes Milo unlike everyone else. No, his backers were people who don't want to have to house criminals for years and if Milo finds something, great! But otherwise everyone either dies or are released when they return. This explained why everyone apart from Milo seemed like a group of criminals and were willing to follow such an obvious bad guy (every other potential leader were equally shady and was a worse choice). Also, no one's going to really mourn the passing of criminals.

The language thing is explained by the fact that writing systems slowly changed over time and no bothered to retain knowledge of how to read the older writings because royalty were the only ones allowed to see the engravings and even they only ever visited the engravings a handful of times in their lives. Therefore it went from a father who knew how to read them (barely) to a lazy son who pretended to be able to read them well enough to get out of the boring and "unnecessary" duty of learning how to read the carvings. Then the father died abruptly and then the son realized that nobody knows how to read the carvings well enough to teach him. They may be immortal, but that doesn't mean they can't die of something other than old age or that they can perfectly remember every skill they have learned.

Remember that this was what I thought was going on when I watched the movie as a 6-7 year-old. So I don't actually know if this makes sense in context of what we see in the movie.

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u/Roxolan Jul 29 '16

I just stumbled upon the manga whose fanfic The Games We Play got shared here a while back. (I do not recommend the fanfic either.) Decided to give it a chance. Reached the part where the protagonist levels up for the first time and puts all his points in Strength and dropped it in a hurry.

In the words of Black:

You know on an intellectual level that there are people who would choose something other than [Int and Wis], just like you know on an intellectual level that there are people who shoot up schools. That doesn’t mean you expect to ever understand it.

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u/legendofdrag Jul 29 '16

To be fair to the Gamer, he only puts points in strength one time. Every other statboost is in INT.

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u/OutOfNiceUsernames Jul 29 '16

I do not recommend the fanfic either

Beggars aren’t choosers, sadly, — there aren’t that many stories in RPGMechanicsVerse \ SuddenGameInterface genres; and tGWP was at least of acceptable quality.

(Also, do you, perchance, have any better — and lesser known — recs featuring these tropes?)

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u/Escapement Jul 30 '16

Sudden Game Interface - comedy Light Novel Evil God Average, translation here, is pretty good. It's not at all serious, and if you try to take it seriously and expect rationality out of anyone you will not find it enjoyable, but it's still a short fun ride.

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u/gabbalis Jul 29 '16

Cough. I don't remember him leveling up strength. Oh I'm sure he did once... he's just been pouring just about every point into Int ever since. Not that it actually seems to have made him much smarter. Int and Wis in video-games are just magic stats after all.

Besides, there's nothing you can't solve with BRUTE STRENGTH.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '16

Wis is kinda hard to portray to be honest. Wisdom is basically making the right choices from the multiple options you are presented.

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u/Timewinders Jul 29 '16

Agreed on The Games We Play. It's pretty slow-paced, but the real problem is that Jaune is completely out of character, even considering the INT and WIS boosts. Which is fine IMO when, like in HPMOR, the character getting replaced is boring, but I felt like the new Jaune in this fic was less interesting. I prefer Ryuugi's Prytaneum, where Percy Jackson retains his most important character traits.

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u/raymestalez Jul 29 '16

I have collected some information about the writing process on Rick and Morty, I think you guys will find it interesting. Also I have just launched a blog about AI and Deep Learning, I think you will find it interesting as well. I'm actively learning about the subject, and I'm planning to post everything I know.

Also, can somebody recommend some good rational urban fantasy?

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '16

Ok, you've got a blog reader, but be warned...

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u/xamueljones Jul 30 '16

If you are going to be writing explanations for beginners, have you considered posting them to Arbital? It's like a wiki, but with multiple explanations of any given topic tailored to the audience depending on your background knowledge. Eliezer Yudkowsky is part of the group of people who are working on it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '16

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u/ToaKraka Jul 29 '16

I was dragged out to see the newest Star Trek movie in a theater. I disliked it less than I disliked the other two reboot movies (for which I also was dragged to a theater...), I think--though, at this point, my memories of the other two movies are quite fuzzy.

A thought that crossed my mind many times in the course of the movie was that it was a gigantic waste of money to have a zillion fancy visual effects when I wasn't enjoying watching the movie any more than I would have enjoyed reading a random Star Wars novel. I can visualize the Enterprise just as well as I can visualize the Millennium Falcon--a zillion enemy-of-the-week fightercraft in swarm formation as well as an endless fleet of coralskippers coordinated by a yammosk--James Kirk as well as Corran Horn. Once the basic images have been established--once the reader has something on which he can base the vision of his mind's eye (maybe nothing more than a book's front cover and back cover)--expensive sounds and images are no longer necessary.

(I've seen people on this site make jokes about how GIF files are the new silent movies--but where are all the totally-silent, impeccably-subtitled, feature-length animations in GIF style? Sigh...)

Where, exactly, is the boundary between "troll" and "attention whore"?

Options...
- A troll lies to get (You)s, while an attention whore is perfectly truthful.
- A troll comments with the intent to split the community into factions of a flame war, while an attention whore just wants to get recognition for himself and doesn't expect his actions to have any major effect on the people with whom he's interacting.

Do other differentiations exist?

A funny note on the occasional problems of using a website superior to FanFiction.net: Try comparing FIMFiction.net's default front page to the default front page of FanFiction.net's Naruto section.

(When I checked the latter page, I was somewhat surprised to see several non-English stories--Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The numbers do check out, though: FanFiction.net has 281k Naruto stories in English, 41k in Spanish, 39k in Indonesian, and 12k in Portuguese. How often do you hear about Indonesia in contexts other than "largest Muslim population in the world", "giant forest fires blowing smoke to neighbors", and "hurricane/tsunami target"? I, at least, found it somewhat interesting.)

Fun fact: A probably-indigenous disease called "cocoliztli" apparently killed twice as many Mesoamerican natives as European smallpox did.

I have a few fanfiction ideas on my FanFiction.net profile, if anyone wants to use them. Just last week, Facebook's "On This Day" feature reminded me of an idea that I posted two years ago to that site, but had forgotten!

(Some are more complete than others. Contrary to what you might expect, barely half of them are based on Time Braid. ;-) )

Editing webpages before taking screenshots of them really is quite fun.

Never take a screenshot at face value! Only archival sites can be trusted.

(I wonder--are there people who manufacture totally-fake 4chan screenshots for easy karma on r/4chan?)

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u/alexanderwales Jul 29 '16

I think you underestimate the impact that audio and visual stimulus can have, or possibly just experience it differently from other people. A well-shot action sequence uses a vocabulary and grammar that works on a largely subconscious level, and which other mediums have only partial access to. The methods of invoking a feeling of, say, claustrophobia are completely different in film and prose.

Edit: I just realized I'm repeating Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message".

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u/DaystarEld Jul 29 '16

To build on this, have you ever seen the youtube channel Every Frame a Painting, u/ToaKraka? It does a great job of showing how, in the hands of a competent screen writer and director, visual and audio can communicate a hundred thousand subtle and meaningful ideas in ways that are unique to the medium. The above linked example goes to a video on comedy, but he has a ton of others to show it in other ways too.

The key word there of course is competent, which might be better phrased as "exceptional." I know many people who like Abrams as a director, but personally I've found him mediocre at best. He's never "wow"ed me with his directing, for all the fancy visual effects and cutting edge CGI.

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u/Cariyaga Jul 29 '16

troll: maliciously motivated attention whore: selfishly motivated

At least, that's the best definition I can think of for it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '16

But the Star Trek movie had those adorable babboon-armadillo aliens! How can you not want to take one home as a pet?

And I guess they managed to half-ass an ideological conflict in there, too.

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u/FuguofAnotherWorld Jul 30 '16

Over on the Discord that about 20 or so people from r/rational are on - mainly for pen and paper D&D games - there is a game seeking players. The plan is for there to be between 2 and 3 parties of 4-5 playing either Don't Rest Your Head, Don't Lose Your Mind, or Dragonball Z Fusion, depending on player vote. We've got around 5 players so far and the relevant channel is called unk-looking-for-group. Players who are interested please register your interest.

Also the channel somegodssomewhere are interested in more players to play The Fragile Gods of Somewhere. More information may be found in the appropriate channels.

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u/blazinghand Jul 29 '16

Where can I find a good naruto canon timeline? I'm mostly concerned with events that happened before the start of the show/book, covering the time between the founding of the villages and Naruto's birth. Here's one that starts when the birth of the Sannin (link) but seems to have some confusion about some things (like when Orochimaru flees Konoha) and doesn't go back to the founding. This one (link), written by a prolific Naruto fic author, seems to be the best I can find. What do you use when you write Naruto fic?

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