beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I dreamt that I and my dream husband the Reverse Flash (!) crossed paths with a whole set of people who were truly, beginning of time onwards, immortal.

They had a different awareness of time than the rest of us, even speedsters. Something more like in Arrival, where all the moments had happened, but in a branching and multiple way. So they were aware of multiple timelines. And in every single one of them, these people lived literally forever.

And they were insufferable condescending pricks to the rest of us.
( Read more... )

I woke up and talked myself into the very firm conviction that an acceptance of risk and even an acceptance of mortality as a possibility is a necessary part of living a full and creative life and connecting to other people.

Which is not a novel conviction, but is somewhat in contradiction of my usual approach, given the panic attacks etc.

But I'd rather have the infinite potential of a life that is going to run into risks and problems and eventual endings, than the limits that limitless length of days put on them.




... in theory at least.

In practice I'm staying home until I get a better idea.

But I'm going to think about it harder.

I kind of hate the idea that a spell can just see your alignment.
Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are.

But Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign has a page where you can work out your alignment
from the thing you did
which is clearly an improvement

(the naughty list at least requires evidence)

Thing is why you did it matters
along with a very sliding scale for what you did.

So there's a scale of Conflict Points and where you end up on the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil alignments depends on how many Conflict Points you have. If you have only 2 you are Lawful Good. Betwee 2 and 6 in fact, still Lawful Good. To get into Chaotic Evil territory at all takes at least 14. And that means the average person, the hypothetical random Neutral person, has between 8 and 12 points of Conflict.

Already I have objections here, because it defines Chaos in terms of failure to Law, rather than prioritising the person over the community.

Motivation can start with 1CP for Justice or Love, 3 CP for Family, all the way up to 5 CP for Pleasure, Amusement or Entertainment.

I mean, I guess this is how they define Lawful Good murder? Sure it's 8 CP for killing someone, but only 1 more if it was for Justice!
... actually that adds up to a little more than Lawful Good can manage. But there's no line about killing someone except Murder, so guess what system leaves no room for most actual adventurers to be Lawful?

I mean I'm agreeing in principle that killing is a Bad thing, but it do make it difficult to use their table for their characters.

ANYway

Examples of how this might feel to characters:
( Read more... )


These alignment rules in Ultimate Campaigns are useful and helpful for playing alignment the way the rule system assumes alignment works.


Unfortunately for the book I have been objecting to alignment in definition and concept since I first picked up the game and this book isn't about to change my mind.


Gives me more tools to argue with though.

There's a story I remember from school assemblies and tried to google just now to get an attribution for, but I don't really know how, without a title, author, or quote. But it goes something like:



A man dies and arrives in the afterlife, and the guy who comes to greet him asks exactly how he wants to spend eternity. And he says he wants a gold castle, a full roast dinner daily, and deliveries of the Times. Which he duly gets.

Every day.

For years, and years, and years.

And after a while he's sick of roast dinners, and he doesn't recognise anyone in the Times, and why should he even care when it's nothing to do with him any more?

And he gets progressively more fed up.

Until he sees the greeter outside his castle and flags him down and yells at him, "What kind of heaven do you call this?"

And the guy is just like "Who said this was heaven?"




Which is your basic be careful what you wish for as suitable for making an impression on twelve year olds, unless it was elevens or tens or under eights.

But it makes a good point.

And it just idly crossed my mind to see who wrote it, or a thing like it, but it turns out that if you mention roast dinners and the times you don't google stories, so. Heck if I know.




But it's right up there with the one about heaven and hell both involving very long spoons. Like, someone has to have written it, but I haven't heard it in a context that would tell me who. And it still seems like a good idea.

I've been watching Continuum and Doctor Who, and reading about Legends of Tomorrow and The Flash, so I've been thinking about time travel morality.

And it absolutely depends on the physics of time travel, in ways that seem sincerely difficult to determine for certain sure.

It's always about free will and self determination vs assorted definitions of the greatest good for the greatest number.

( Read more... )




That's a very long way to say it
but
if a story does not give us the rules of time travel, we can't tell if the consequences of a travellers actions are good or bad, and we can't evaluate them in a time travel context.

If the rules aren't consistent it gets worse.

And seeing as we don't have time travel or any ability to know what happens elsewhere in the multiverse, we're pretty likely to evaluate actions in a simple way, where saving people is a good thing.

Even if it overrides their choices.

Or might butterfly all of history so whole family trees don't get born.

We can't know all that, we can't even call it a short term long term problem, so we're just going to sit there and sulk that someone could be saved so they should have.




My favourite thing that Legends failed to do? The approach I'd take with that crew? Play as much as you can in the gap between history and happened. Treat all of time as a heist where you have to avoid the cameras. Steal people out from under. Crew a ship with ghosts, whose only impact on the timeline thereafter has to be just as secret as their rescue. Steal the Acheron and make the name mean something.

Then you consider changing history to be a risk, but changing time to be a challenge.




But there's also the time traveller's dilemma, Reverse Flash edition: history says you did it. Do you change things and risk a paradox, do you fight fate and find out the hard way how it herds you, or do you consider the record to be sufficient reason to go ahead and do it? ( Read more... )



Time travel stories at the simplest ask: Even if we could know for absolutely certain what the consequences of our actions are, do the ends justify the means?

But time travel stories are not on the whole that simple.

So they pit free will against fate and choice against survival maths and generally get messy enough you can't tell if they've done good, and neither can they.

... putting them right back in the fog we linears have to live in anyways.





I get hung up on what we could go back and change, and should probably take a holiday from time machine stories to practice the here now a bit.

But they do allow explorations of possibilities not much available elsewise.

There was a thing at Redemption in part about how Immortality might not in fact be a good thing. Which always pisses me off. But it's that Highlander Claudia Jardine thing where she says she can only feel the music if she fears death, plus the idea that we need that ultimate deadline to make us ever finish something.

And, no? I mean I've heard the poetry teacher say that everything is eventually about sex or death, but it was bollocks then too. Humans have feelings for a wide variety of reasons? Humans have feelings about cupcakes and quesadillas and beer. I'm reasonably sure there's some really ancient poetry about beer.

And as for needing the deadline or we'll fiddle with it forever... look, my WIP folder is a graveyard of yesterday's dreams, but what twenty, possibly thirty years of such things has taught me is: you can only write *that* story today. The one in your head right now, the one with the vivid mature characters who act just like real humans as you recognise them right now? You can write that today. Because in five, ten, fifteen years you'll look back on it and wonder what you were thinking. You'll have moved on. Your understanding will have moved on. Your tastes will have moved on. I mean I've always been more of a Giles or Methos fan, but I couldn't from here write a Xander or Richie as sexy if I'd only just met them. I could remember how they used to look to me, but new people that age are just... young. And that's the tiniest part of it. And it isn't - it is not - simply that you understand better now. Every generation complains olds don't remember being youngs, and they've got a bit of truth in that. Every generation was only young in their own context too. We can remember, we can imagine, but there's always stuff we just won't know from here, and did then.

So that story in your head? Write it today. It'll be a whole different story tomorrow, as a different person writes it.

... and if I took my own advice more often the story graveyard would be a bit less tragic, obviously.

But the other thing is sex. Or intercourse, shall we say. Story is one fraction of the ways humans connect and are in conversation with each other. People still make art in reaction to the art of thousands of years ago, but it's different art than it would have been last century, because that conversation has moved on. The deadline isn't just people getting dead, it's story getting born. How many times have we raced to publish before the next episode jossed us? How many stories get irrelevant a season or two along? How many dead fandoms would not be waiting for your input any more, so the story just never gets told? We might write for ourselves, but we publish to connect, converse, communicate. We're not just making words, we're making communities.

So the kind of person who would take forever seeking perfection, they exist, because there's seven billion people and there's always one of anyone. But they've got to be outnumbered by the prolifically creative, the exuberant profusion, the back and forth. Even just the people who'll throw a hundred pots looking for the good one, instead of fiddling around with their first. And we can teach people to be that, even against their anxious inclination, just by encouragement and feedback.

I've seen people say they write like death's on their tail, because it has been trying to eat them all their lives. And they write beautiful and brilliant things, and maybe that makes that kind of fear look useful. But I've seen more cut off in the middle of things, or writing despite the deadly grind, writing as they can between hospital visits until you hear the worst and realise that WIP will never update again.

So don't tell me about the benefits of mortality. It might feel more cosy to think we wouldn't want the impossible things anyway, but I'd rather think big. Want. Dream. Write as if we'll all be here to feedback for a thousand years. Because it's not the thought of death that keeps us going, it's the thought of all the dreams we could be having, and sharing with all these people around here.

You know how sometimes you just wake up grumpy?
Today I woke up grumpy about necromancy always being considered automatically evil
when death spells of other colleges aren't.

( Read more... )



And yet 'charm' spells are 'good', and animating meat is evil?

They have their priorities so very backwards.




Of course they also have unhelpfully fuzzy definitions of good, evil, order and chaos, that don't match the working definitions in other books.

I was also thinking about how our definitions of evil are heavily shaped by our reproductive strategy. Mostly I think this when trying to figure out goa'uld, but, we have one child at a time and look after them intensively and for a long time, and we call that Good. But the goa'uld have thousands of spawn. If they picked one to look after for a long time then how would that be more Good? What is Good to a species with the exact opposite reproductive strategy? Probably something about the greatest good for the greatest number, personal is not the same as important, changing the whole feeding ground for the better rather than individually nurturing. Needs thinking through.



Or, possibly, I could find something useful and productive to do with my day.

It took me half an hour to get out of bed this morning. I don't have half an hour, it's a college day. that half hour just ate my first catch the bus point. and now I feel sick enough I can't get around to eating. I tried eating a small square of chocolate cake to kick start but now I feel sicker and vaguely off chocolate. but I'm up and dressed and packed apart from the food so that part is working.

My life is all push and no pull. Nothing I particularly want to do, just a bunch of stuff I'm avoiding.

Avoidy thoughts this morning were compare/contrasting two Rodney/John get stuck in VR fics. in one they do beautiful math together, in the other they surf and write VR. in one they know they're in there, in the other only Rodney knows. The math one is kind of awesome, the other one is the kind of hell that's disguised itself as a heaven. ( Read more... )

See, all Dire Consequences if I Don't, no good consequences if I do.

You know, I tried to go to sleep, then there was some thumping and swearing I paid no never mind to, because, usual, but then there were police type noises and I had to get up and check, and yes, indeed, one my neighbours called police again for cause (I think to do with a door? They were being quiet and discreet but you can hear everything around here.) And now I'm not sleepy. So.


I was thinking about the ethics of owning souls. ( Read more... )

There's this idea that comes up in Lit fairly often that there are 'universal experiences' - things about being human that are common to everyone.

It's a bit of a problematic idea from where I'm standing. Like there's only one way to be human.

It's like saying death is universal... okay, maybe, but one's relationship to death is very personal. Always different.

And if it is not one's own death (which do make it somewhat easier to write about) then there's another layer of different, the relationship with the person that died.

Even if it's a specific category, like "death of a parent", how many different ways are there to relate to a parent? There's a spectrum running from best friend to worst enemy, closest part of your life to vaguest acquaintance. Some people never meet their parents, have other caregivers that aren't in quite the same roles. Some people have bad people they have to live with instead of the idea of a caregiver at all. And some people get the cereal box family, two parents that love them exactly like the stories say they should.

So how are reactions ever supposed to be universal? To life or death?


Sometimes it leaves me feeling like an inadequate human being, that I don't have reactions just like all the big stories.

Then I get annoyed that the big stories are inadequate, because here's this human being who hasn't read the one about her yet. Maybe need to write it then.

Mostly though I notice it when I'd like to be helpful but all I can think of is the person they lost was all different than the person I lost and I'm not sure anything translates.


This is one reason I like fanfic as a way of talking about stuff. We know some about Buffy's mom and Buffy's relationship to her. We can talk about that specific relationship and the feelings wrapped up in that and the loss and all. And then we have a common experience to start with.

Except for the thing where it's not technically real, it's very helpful for translation.

But the except for is pretty big.

I have been thinking about hate, and why it is a bad thing.
Someone this afternoon suggested it could sometimes be a good thing, like if you hate slavery, and I kind of flailed a bit and went 'no, because... *completely different thing here*'. Because it seemed obvious, so I hadn't thought about it.

So my now thought is that not-thinking is a large part of why hate is of the bad.

Like it leads to a kind of blindness. Like the thing that is hated is just... no longer examined, because there's this category that is Bad now and the only reaction is Hate.

And hate is sort of hungry, like it wants to get bigger? Like... the idea of collaborators, or if you're not with us you're against us? Because there's this thing that is Bad, and if you don't see it that way that makes you Bad too. Because Hate is very very sure of itself and not looking at alternatives any more.

And then there's that thing, that little leap that isn't little at all, between hating an idea or an action, and hating the person that holds that idea or does that action. Difference between hating slavery and hating slavers. Getting rid of slavery sounds of the good, but getting rid of all the people that have slaves not so much.

And hating people is not even hating the 4D continuing person, because it isn't seeing evidence and change and stuff, because hate mostly sees hate. Like, hate has this set idea about the hated, and that's the only thing it sees, not anything outside of hate.

So hate is blind, and therefore of the bad.

I think.



Ignorance as the bad that makes all the other bads; makes sense to me.


I don't think hate is a kind of energy that lets a person aim it and use it to get things done. It seems to me more that hate is a kind of energy that aims people and gets them to do things. Except for the part where people are the ones making the hate because at the minute I'm not thinking of a universe of disembodied forces.
Feedback loop?
Difficult to get out of sort, where more hate means thinking more hate is appropriate.



I am still thinking about this one. I've thought plenty about Lust but not Hate. Probably says something about me.

Also I thought a lot about Pride.
And how there's a sort of thing that is opposite of Pride in a lot of ways but also does damage - like that thing where Willow didn't seem to think she could mess anyone up seriously because she was Willow, rather than noticing that actually people were getting seriously messed up therefore she was powerful. Like underestimates are dangerous too?
There's probably already a word for that but I'm still poking the thought into shape.




Sometimes I want to just go study philosophy properly, because people have been having these thoughts and arguing about them for the longest time.

Except Cultural Studies seems to me to be about figuring how thoughts work once they get out into the world, which is a bit like philosophy only on the output side, sort of thing. So studying this bit first or as well seems pretty useful.

But I still feel like I'm reinventing the wheel and having half an argument that everyone probably had already a lot.

... and Highlander and Forever Knight and probably every other show I've ever watched:

The concept of One True Love is *damn* depressing.
( Read more... )valuing the One seems like a pretty good start. But when they're already dancing with the whole blessed universe?

I don't want to think of them becoming that small.

It is possible to love completely, and yet love more than one.

It is, in fact, desireable. And an ideal of many religions. Though for reasons unknown, some of them leave the sex parts out.

Possibly because it do tend to get a bit complicated having someone be more than 5 places at once.

Doesn't mean it's bad to try.

Sometimes I worry I get wound up about the wrong things. I can get everso wordy on the subject of the dumbth of the idea of covering up demons and/or aliens for the good of the world.
And really, it isn't exactly likely to come up in day to day life...
... right?

Unlike my human rights for vampires speech, which has *obvious* real world applicability.

Actually, when I wrote that five minutes ago I put an :eyeroll: at the end of the sentence, but then I went to check the news.
News scary. ( Read more... )


One of Niven's laws:
The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.


That, right there, is pretty damn important.

And the idea of anyone, individual or organisation, being dedicated to destroying, undermining, or stealing all the data that could back that up with real world proof? Really pisses me off.



... of course since I tend to gravitate to the 'horror' end of things, a lot of stories seem to add on the end of the law "and that's really scary".
Which, you know, bit of a problematic idea right there.

And one of the reasons I most like the teams - Buffy, Stargate, Doctor Who - which have aliens and humans on *both* sides. Because then there's "different but not trying to kill us" as well as "different and dangerous" and the important bit isn't just different.



Torchwood has Jack.
... am wondering how he counts ...