Nacarbac [any]

I’ll always recommend Land of the Lustrous/Houseki no Kuni. It’s a beautiful adaptation. Androgynous post-post-post apocalypse crystal-coral humanoids living on an island paradise, bullied by Buddhist moon ghosts. Does get a bit dark towards the end.

Frieren, from your list, is also a wonderfully chilled watch.

Drawback of lifting interesting ideas from fiction, they often fail to consider the very different dynamic of shared creative storytelling.

Law and Chaos work for Elric and Amber, because the authors are only trying to tell one story and have full control of their presentation and interactions.

Same with Lord of the Rings leading, in DnD, to having Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit. Although again that was better in earlier editions (if overcomplicated) of DnD where the fighters gained power in the form of having minions.

Edit: Not that you can’t have a game with bizarre metaphysics, it just has implications that DnD never cared to think through and apply clearly and upfront. There are endless arguments about Paladins murdering anything that pings their Detect Evil (among many other psychotic things Paladin players have done), because in-setting it’s a divinely granted sense for cosmic objective badness. But since it’s so dissonant with our real life expectations of behaviour, and not reflected in the setting at all, it leads to all kinds of (often contradictory) contortions by the writers to avoid just admitting that alignment is fucked if you don’t want a setting full of murder-Paladins.

I think that would be only possible with genetics, and maybe only when young, since it’d be outright adding new perception rather than using existing channels like this… But you could possibly emulate it with goggles that spread out the target colours and squash the rest of the spectrum?

I kinda want a tapet lucetum myself…

Yeah, Phacelia isn’t native to the UK, but is pretty solidly spread anyway - classic Victorian plant plundering, though at least this time it wasn’t Giant Hogweed.

The phacelia in my garden is full of all kinds of bees, they love it. I can’t recall any other plants getting more attention, and they’re a pretty flower as well.

Well that’s just it - it isn’t easy at all. You need to have destroyed your self-esteem or narrowed your circle humanity or beaten down whatever quality prevents us from preying on others without suffering for it.

Like the call of the void - standing at the edge of a cliff, or behind someone who is, that misty sense of how easy it would be to jump or to push is a warning of a horrible potential that our deeper structures want to make sure we’re alert to prevent.

If it’s just a remake of Civil War, but everyone is dipped in gold leaf, half the soldiers are Really Very Big, the white house is like the Mines of Moria after a jetwash, the president is the size of an oil tanker, and the photographers are actually making magic paintings, it’ll be a masterpiece.

Edit: and to step closer to the lathe, the story is told by the descriptions on each Elden Ring themed snack you can get from the concessions. Radahn Rum Punch, Malenia Mint (and blue cheese) popcorn, blah blah blah.

Shadows of the Erdtree, the DLC, is noteworthy for actually having a plot where things happen.

Even then I’d say it’s still a pretty weak plot, and the delivery is awkwardly struggling against their usual style. Which is still an improvement Elden Ring desperately needed, and understandable when I have no doubt the direct writing style has suffered some atrophy.

Huh, saying that has actually made me a bit more optimistic for this adaptation, since they do show a consistent desire to improve and experiment. Not for the adaptation itself, but it might be a good learning experience if there’s a lot of back-and-forth with A24?

Garth Marenghi never said a goddamn thing wrong in his entire life.

Check out the fan comic. I remember it being “rad as hell”. The archive links seem to work okay - it’s also on their deviantart, but that interface seemed appalling.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150211002826/http://www.snowflamecomic.com/?comic=snowflame-01-01

Lord of the Mysteries is being adapted, and that’s a kinda Bloodborne-y setting and story. It’ll be huge over here.

It happens, and it wasn’t your fault. Microsoft software is like an evil pearl - a tiny kernel of functionality wrapped in protective layers of insulting bullshit.

I have a folder on OneDrive named FUCK ONEDRIVE. I created it after hours of panic as I couldn’t find my writing folders, or their backups, and I now cannot delete it. Luckily I found the folders in a parallel backup structure made so it could roughly interface with a different program.

I don’t know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.

They most likely are not sentient, as we currently understand or can perceive, though the complexity of the networks formed within a forest might, might, allow for something like it in aggregate. Consciousness is deeply strange, for something that should be so familiar.

But as Angel says, here it’s just a paralytic deflection. Like saying that eating plants is stealing from the animals that could eat them, therefore we’re already sinners, therefore we might as well sin some more.

I think the text is misrepresenting - he didn’t specify humanoid in the quote. But running with it to try and speculate, hm, a humanoid bodyplan would be compatible with (the few) existing technologies and infrastructure - and as long as it isn’t limited to following human functionality for the limbs (especially in space or underwater) then it’s just a multiarmed drone that happens to fit in an acceleration couch or whatever. Not sure that’s enough of a benefit unless you intend actual humans to follow after.

I guess it’d also be a good visual stunt to have a humanoid do stuff? At least for orbital and underwater stuff it could even be teleoperated in an immersive VR style - signal lag would make it a bit dreamlike, but having a humanoid automata build a sandcastle on the Moon or explore a habitat being printed by specialised drones would be extremely cool.

Define religion.

I remember Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t being a good channel. A person who got really into botany in jail, wandering around showcasing local flora and often discussing the social collapse and poor urban planning in evidence.

Instant-blindness lasers are really easy… but pretty much uncontrollable and unpredictable. They’d end up dazzling each other and knocking their own planes out of the sky.

Lasers that are actually lethal would be about ten thousand times worse, even handwaving the incredible technical challenges.

Corvids are smart and have some kind of active shared education, so they’re always quite skittish around humans. I suspect (with no evidence or research) that they sense the cultural enmity humans have, and possibly remember the long history of “pest control” (which still happens on farms). They’ll eventually learn that you’re a cool human.

One way I feed them is to show them the food, then place it somewhere visible like on a post or stump, and back away to let them choose to take it. Throwing motions startle them pretty easily, even when they’re very gentle.

Yeah, I tried to use it a bit for my own mid-30’s MSc, and it was useful in the sense that it produced a terrible paragraph with some structure which I could then viciously edit into something new - decent at fixing grammar and finding words-for-things though. But that’s not too different from my earlier method of “just mash keys wildly and passionately and then go back over to edit out the sedition and most of the swearing”.

The making up sources thing was interesting however, because what it reaaaaally did was put me onto the trick of following up the sources of my enemies, which very often revealed the dishonest cherry picking and outright misrepresentation involved, even in pretty Serious Works.

As an aside I do think it’s good to get some experience with an LLM’s output even if - especially if - you’re against them, because it gives you a sense for them. I hear a very distinct and kinda annoying “chirpy ironic” voice in my head when reading LLM output, from my subconscious doing the analysis. Not totally reliable, I’m sure, but feels helpful.

Please don’t put spoilers in titles.