Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Baffle]

"Bob went to the shop and bought some eggs. Then he went home and fell asleep."

The pointlessness of life under capitalism.

 

[Ag3ma]

"Bob went to the shop and bought some eggs. Then he went home and fell asleep."

Glib, but that's technically a plot, and one bereft of theme.

That's not glib, it's an attempt at reductio ad absurdam, which would make it of questionable value at best.

However, it has a theme anyway: for instance "A day in the life of a man" - not even an uncommon theme.

And that's without factoring in whether it has a theme on a meta-level, which is an attempt to create a story without a theme.

 

[Absent]

"Bob went to the shop and bought some eggs. Then he went home and fell asleep."

Bob's lack of stamina.

 

[Baffle]

And that's without factoring in whether it has a theme on a meta-level, which is an attempt to create a story without a theme.

Winning, but at what price? Read more to find out!

 

[Dalisclock]

Bob's lack of stamina.

Kid woke bob up at 3 AM. Bob needs a nap.

 

[Baffle]

Casting Brendan Fraser in yet another comeback role as Sleepy Bob in the hit screenplay adaptation Shopping Eggstravaganza, this Easter.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

If your plot doesn't have any theme at all, how is it a story?

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...."

"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

 

[Eacaraxe]

This is the equivalent of writing a story in binary and then arguing that words aren't necessary, which you told me not to do.

See what I mean-- it's technically possible, in a meaningless way that doesn't apply to almost any real-world stories.

This would be a great time to point to, well, the 19th century Russian author of your choice to make a point dryness, mundanity, and angst can convey theme in and of itself.

 

[Dalisclock]

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...."

"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

Ngl, that 2nd one always makes me sad.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

"Replication is hard" can be used to lazily dismiss any and all psychological phenomena; It's a non-argument.

If it had never been replicated, and attempts had consistently gone counter to prediction, that would be another thing. But that didn't happen.



As has already been covered, the 'same study' wasn't done with random numbers, because that's very obviously impossible.

Again, you rearrange like everything I say. I didn't say "replication is hard", I said there's a massive replication crisis in psychology because further studies find different results quite often. Psychology is obviously harder to study than most fields to begin with as well.

The same study was literally done with random numbers and got the same results, thus it's not a human bias... If you think someone has a bias for picking heads over tails and random numbers pick heads the same amount as that person, then they don't have a bias.

Clickbait outrage aside, this is the true answer. The entire system is being reworked to allow more than just your generic half-elf and half-human. You'll be able to create a lizardman/dwarf or a drow/aarakocra alongside your standard human/elf with a more all-encompassing mechanic. In typical fashion, certain culture-warriors are trying to misinform to continue milking the hate gravy-train.

You can be half anything with the new rule but it's totally not the same as the half-elf/orc races. You pick your race and have to use attributes/traits from that race and then you can say you look half of something else as well. So can if you're making say a character that's half elf and half dwarf, you can only have traits from the "main" race. They are, in essence, removing content (not a lot, mind you) for literally no reason.

 

[Silvanus]

Again, you rearrange like everything I say. I didn't say "replication is hard", I said there's a massive replication crisis in psychology because further studies find different results quite often. Psychology is obviously harder to study than most fields to begin with as well.

Uh-huh, an argument that can be equally levied at the entire field of psychology. It's an empty soundbite without more detail.

The same study was literally done with random numbers and got the same results, thus it's not a human bias...

As has already been pointed out to you, no, the same study was not done with random numbers. It is literally impossible to transpose a study that looks at self-evaluation onto randomly generated numbers.

What they did was identify a similar, though much less significant, trend in a dataset that they generated for the purpose of comparison. That's not doing the "same study with random numbers".

If you think someone has a bias for picking heads over tails and random numbers pick heads the same amount as that person, then they don't have a bias.

... I don't have words. You wouldn't get away with this in secondary school. The maths teacher would roll his eyes and think he'd failed the kids.

 

[Trunkage]

... I don't have words. You wouldn't get away with this in secondary school. The maths teacher would roll his eyes and think he'd failed the kids.

But you can't possibly have a bias if the numbers happens to match your bias! 13/50!

 

[Ag3ma]

Oh my god. What is wrong with Diane Abbott?

Labour suspends Diane Abbott in attempt to stifle fresh antisemitism row

MP loses party whip after writing letter suggesting Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people had not experienced racism

www.theguardian.com

I could get a certain point that Irish, Travellers and Jews may not face racism in the same way as black or Asian people, but... seriously? This is clod-hoppingly insensitive at the most optimistic, and staggeringly naive in the context of Labour spending so much time trying to quash accusations of antisemitism. Okay, she's apologised unreservedly, but this isn't an off-the-cuff comment in the heat of the moment, she sat down and wrote it. She then says something something accidentally sent in a first draft, but you know what? Most of us wouldn't even be composing that shit in a first draft.

 

[Absent]

The militant anti-musk internet crowd, as moronic as the militant pro-musk internet crowd because people, is discovering the "rapid unscheduled dissassembly" expression, and let the "yes it's the joke" whoosh at low orbit altitude over their heads.

https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/spacex-explosion-rapid-unscheduled-explosion-memes

Wait till they suddenly learn about "lithobreaking" and "engine-rich exhaust".

 

[Thaluikhain]

Oh my god. What is wrong with Diane Abbott?

Labour suspends Diane Abbott in attempt to stifle fresh antisemitism row

MP loses party whip after writing letter suggesting Jewish, Irish, and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people had not experienced racism

www.theguardian.com

I could get a certain point that Irish, Travellers and Jews may not face racism in the same way as black or Asian people, but... seriously? This is clod-hoppingly insensitive at the most optimistic, and staggeringly naive in the context of Labour spending so much time trying to quash accusations of antisemitism. Okay, she's apologised unreservedly, but this isn't an off-the-cuff comment in the heat of the moment, she sat down and wrote it. She then says something something accidentally sent in a first draft, but you know what? Most of us wouldn't even be composing that shit in a first draft.

As an aside, she points to people with red hair as an example of people that face prejudice (not racism), just like Jews..

“It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”

And of course, the big reason why red hair is seen as a bad thing is that its often associated with certain ethnic groups...such as Jews.

 

[Terminal Blue]

You're talking at cross-purposes here - representation isn't "the point" of the work, you can have representation of something without a point behind it.

This is a bit of a recurring pattern (one might say, a theme) of our conversations, but you seem to be setting a very high bar for what qualifies as meaning, and I'm not sure why.

Okay, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. However, what is a cigar? To even know what a cigar is, I have to have some cultural knowledge about cigars.

And if you're describing a character and you have them smoking a cigar, then I as a reader am going to use my cultural knowledge to try and figure out what that means, not on the level of "ah, clearly the cigar represents a phallus and this character has an unstable attachment to his mother" but on the level of "what does my cultural knowledge say about cigars and people who smoke them?"

For example, cigars are a relatively expensive luxury good. If a character is smoking a cigar, then I know they are someone who is willing to spend money on an expensive luxury good. Based on this, I might assume they are somewhat wealthy or hedonistic. Phallic symbolism aside, cigars in media do tend to relate to a characters personality, so I might assume that because this character smokes a cigar they share some qualities with other characters who smoke cigars. If a character is smoking a cigar in public, I might assume they like to draw attention to themselves or don't care about social convention (because most people don't smoke cigars in public).

Sure, some of the things I might assume are based on tropes and stereotypes, not all of them will apply in any given case and they don't necessarily reflect reality. But we aren't talking about reality. If you gave that character a cigar I, as your reader, a going to assume you did it for a reason. Maybe the reason is something stupid like you were really craving a smoke while writing and just couldn't stop thinking about cigars or maybe it's something mundane like you needed that character to be holding something in their hand, but there is going to be a reason because art is the product of a person with intent.

Most people who have basic knowledge about what a cigar is or have consumed the same media will tend to come to similar assumptions, because we expect an author who lives in the same culture as us to share the same cultural knowledge. You could choose to ignore some or all of that cultural knowledge in order to subvert our audience expectations (although in some cases doing so would create further questions - if this character is so poor how do they afford cigars?) But you cannot simply pretend a cigar is meaningless. It's a representation of a real object that has cultural meaning. It doesn't have to be deeper than that, but that is already deep enough that you have to address it.

If the point is to create an entertaining story, then an entertaining story is still made up of elements which have cultural meaning. That's part of what makes it entertaining in the first place. Something completely meaningless, like a list of telephone numbers, isn't entertaining and thus noone would read it for entertainment.

Something like The Expanse (which gave me the inspiration for writing that scene) focuses a lot on real-world mechanics for space travel and represents it quite well, but is there some larger point behind that? No, not really.

Why write it then?

The deliberate decision to include the high-G scenes in the Expanse does have a point. Usually it has several points. These scenes create tension because characters we (hopefully) care about are in a stressful and physically punishing situation. There's always the fear that something will go wrong (and because we see it go wrong on occasion, we are always aware of that).

Also, it does facilitate important themes. James Corey could have written in a device that cancels out gravity and had everyone walking around perfectly fine like a Star Trek episode, after all the Epstein drive itself is basically magic. But instead he chooses to emphasize over and over again the fact that space is an alien and hostile environment from our earth-bound perspective, and one of the many, many ways this is shown is by showing the effects of varying gravity. It's not there for the sake of being there, it guides our imagination, communicates ideas or makes us feel a certain way which we might enjoy. That's the art.

And sure, it helps us feel immersed and grounded in the world by showing that the world operates on consistent rules. But again, Corey could have made whatever rules he wanted. He could have handwaved gravity away. Choosing not to was a deliberate action that has a point.

 

[Hawki]

This is a bit of a recurring pattern (one might say, a theme) of our conversations, but you seem to be setting a very high bar for what qualifies as meaning, and I'm not sure why.

Fun as it would be to discuss cigars, I'll keep this as short as possible.

1: We have different definitions of what counts as "meaning." In this case, I'm referring to core, deeper ideas of a work. Yes, individual elements of a work can have individual meanings, some of them relating to the core theme, some of them not.

2: Yes, a cigar can have meaning in the sense that the presence of a cigar can tell us something about a character - maybe they're rich, corrupt, maybe smoking a cigar is meant to convey that they're a badass, there's any number of ways a cigar can be used to convey character. That's "meaning" in the sense that the cigar has meaning, sure, but is there always a deeper theme behind the cigar? For instance, there's any no. of characters that smoke cigars, that doesn't mean that the cigar has meaning beyond the character themselves. For instance, Duke Nukem smoking a cigar has no meaning beyond Duke himself. On the other, that Macbeth sees a dagger before him has meaning beyond Macbeth since it ties in with the overall themes of the work (ambition leading to one's own demise).

Why write it then?

The deliberate decision to include the high-G scenes in the Expanse does have a point. Usually it has several points. These scenes create tension because characters we (hopefully) care about are in a stressful and physically punishing situation. There's always the fear that something will go wrong (and because we see it go wrong on occasion, we are always aware of that).

Well, okay, sure, if one defines "meaning" as "purpose," then yes, the scene in purpose does, in part, facilitate tension (or an attempt at tension - by definition, the Operative would have to survive the scene).

Also, it does facilitate important themes. James Corey could have written in a device that cancels out gravity and had everyone walking around perfectly fine like a Star Trek episode, after all the Epstein drive itself is basically magic. But instead he chooses to emphasize over and over again the fact that space is an alien and hostile environment from our earth-bound perspective, and one of the many, many ways this is shown is by showing the effects of varying gravity. It's not there for the sake of being there, it guides our imagination, communicates ideas or makes us feel a certain way which we might enjoy. That's the art.

And sure, it helps us feel immersed and grounded in the world by showing that the world operates on consistent rules. But again, Corey could have made whatever rules he wanted. He could have handwaved gravity away. Choosing not to was a deliberate action that has a point.

Gone on a bit of a tangent here, but okay:

1: I pretty much agree with everything you've said above when it comes to the nature of The Expanse, I didn't say otherwise.

2: One zero-g scene in one story (and a fan-created story at that) isn't equivalent to a setting where zero-g is the norm, not the exception - the zero-g in The Expanse is a core part of the worldbuilding (theme too if you like, what with the hostility of space), it is NOT thematic in what I wrote (really, I can assure you of that).

3: I should also point out here that I wouldn't under normal circumstances throw around stuff I wrote in the same breath with actual authors/screenwriters, but that's the way things have unfolded in this thread.

 

[Baffle]

Cigars smell horrendous.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I could get a certain point that Irish, Travellers and Jews may not face racism in the same way as black or Asian people, but... seriously?

So, these are her actual words, emphasis mine.

Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism”. They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.

It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

But here's the thing, I think she's wrong, and she has a bit of a history of making what I think are kind of cringey takes, but I don't think she's so wrong as to deserve the reaction she's getting at all.

We are watching an (admittedly public) argument between two black women over the definition of racism. Even if you think (as I do) that Abbott's point is wrong or limiting or close minded, there is something extremely weird about watching a bunch of (predominantly white) politicians scrambling to publicly declare how unacceptable her beliefs are and essentially lecturing her on what racism is.

Turning racism into a sacred cow, even for people who have actually experienced it, and policing discussion between people who have experienced it strikes me as far more insidious than anything Abbott said there.

I'd also be far more inclined to care if any of these people weren't openly transphobic. Because, you know, that's just a legitimate opinion on a complex issue..

 

[Thaluikhain]

Not to mention, how the same politicians have reacted to racism in the past is often just a tad different to how they are reacting here.