moonlit-tulip

[moonlit-tulip]

Morph: distributed consciousness into a number of small-but-still-visible components - Sandman, for example, but not a T1000/nanomachines.

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

Depends a lot on implementation-details of the aesthetic design of the components, their sensory capacity, whether they support assembly into a humanoid body, et cetera. Decentralization would be neat and I would all-else-equal like to acquire it, but I wouldn't want to lose out on cuddles, or physical-sensation-focused kink activities, or gender-euphoria-mining from my body-shape, or more abstract looking-pretty-by-my-own-standards, et cetera. So it ends up potentially pretty great if it comes out favorably on those metrics, and potentially not worth the cost otherwise.

[moonlit-tulip]

Morphological freedom ask meme: Giant brain in tank, interacting with meatspace via infrastructure. (I'm imagining humanoid avatars connected to the walls and/or tank via possibly-organic cabling, in addition to the regular doors and cameras and stuff.)

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know

Having backup bodies would be nice, but needing a cable connection to a central brain would cost me most of the upside—much less backup-value in case of emergency, since they could pretty easily all be squashed together with my main brain in the event of an earthquake or fire or suchlike—while also introducing a bunch of downside-inconvenience in needing to do cable-management. (I switched my main headphones from wired to wireless years ago due to the inconveniences of cable-management; I wouldn't expect a me in this form to exist-in-a-body much less often than I-in-my-current-form wear headphones.) And this seems like it'd be an inconvenient-to-move sort of body-setup, not compatible with going out more-than-negligibly-often to interesting events like the shows and holiday-celebrations and so forth which I currently enjoy going out to on occasion. So overall I'd expect it to be a downgrade on net.

[moonlit-tulip]

Also, what did you find impactful about MGLN S1 and S2?

(Context)

It's been nearly two years since I last rewatched them, so this is going to be a bit looser than it otherwise might be, but, in broad strokes (with warning for spoilers below the break):

Well-executed conflicts between sympathetic-and-well-intentioned characters. The first season does it pretty well with Nanoha versus Fate, albeit with Precia in the background being relatively more traditionally evil; the second season tops it by not bothering to have any characters in the role Precia filled in the first season.

Lots of narrative focus on a certain sort of character-dynamic I tend to be very into in fiction, which I sometimes loosely gesture at with the description 'characters being intensely self-sacrificingly devoted to other characters' but with that gesture being pretty imprecise. (I would like to find a better one; I have yet to succeed at this.) The way Nanoha and Fate are towards one another in the first season has a good amount of the relevant thing; the way the Wolkenritter are towards Hayate in the second season has even more of it.

This isn't as much a thing in the first season, but the second season has some really excellent buildup-and-eventual-collapse of dramatic irony towards the lead-in to the finale, around Episode 9. That episode's hospital-visit and subsequent rooftop fight are a pretty plausible contender for best execution of the particular sort of dramatic-irony-thing that sequence is doing that I've encountered in fiction so far. (I am, at the very least, failing to think of plausible counterexamples as I write this.)

Also particular credit to the first season's final big Nanoha-versus-Fate fight for being the first instance I encountered, and my favorite instance I've encountered so far, of the "character romantically tanks her love interest's strongest attack head-on" pattern, which is a pattern I encounter only rarely in fiction—Nanoha did it, a Worm fanfic whose name I'll put in ROT13 because mentioning it in this context is a bit spoilery (Oybbq, ol OrnpbaUvyy) did it, and I don't actually recall encountering it anywhere else outside of my own writing inspired by those two—but keep on finding thoroughly excellent where I do happen to encounter it.

Probably there's more I'm forgetting—it has been a while, at this point—but this is hopefully at least a decent overview-gesture.

[moonlit-tulip]

Fate/Zero fanfic. Contains major spoilers for both Fate/stay night and Fate/Zero. Written for Sakura Exchange 2025. ~2.5k words.

Synopsis below the cut to mitigate spoiler-risk.

Matou Kariya's 'training' takes a toll, not just on his body, but also on his mind; but he does his best to keep a hold of his sanity nonetheless. The cure he chooses proves worse than the disease.

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...whoops. On initial posting I failed to actually put the link into its proper position in this post-intended-as-a-linkpost, and just had the synopsis hanging by itself. I have now edited to fix this mistake. Apologies for any resulting inconvenience.

In which the sorceress Melanie Thalnesdottr dwells, at some length, on mortality, power, and her turbulent relationship with the local queen. A tragedy of insufficient common knowledge, reflected through a mirror.

A short story I wrote for Everything is Femslash Exchange 2025. ~1.5k words.

[moonlit-tulip]

In which the sorceress Melanie Thalnesdottr dwells, at some length, on mortality, power, and her turbulent relationship with the local queen. A tragedy of insufficient common knowledge, reflected through a mirror.

A short story I wrote for Everything is Femslash Exchange 2025. ~1.5k words.

[moonlit-tulip]

#some sort of jigsaw-puzzle game that ran on 90s-era mac os#the puzzle-pieces were ~world-map-styled with green and blue parts looking like land and ocean#i was a tiny kid (somewhere in the 2-4-years-old zone) and accordingly was terrible at it#but i managed to start winning once in a while once i figured out where to poke in the settings to generate puzzles with only 6 pieces#(i think 2 tall by 3 wide if I remember right?)#(it was the minimum they offered; it was. uh. very easy.)#no idea what it was called but i occasionally think back on it and wonder

Writing these tags inspired me to go and do a bit of searching-around online, subsequently. Apparently it was a game called Jigsaw Puzzle which came packaged in with the system in that era! Which has almost no presence on the modern internet, but I managed to find a couple videos of it courtesy of speedrun.com, and it's sufficiently close to my memories-from-back-then that I'm pretty confident it's the same game even if it also suggests that those memories were wrong in details (e.g. the maps being more multi-colored than I remembered).

(I am amused that both of those speedruns are on the same only-6-pieces setting that Kid Me ended up gravitating towards. ...also feeling surprising amounts of competitive I Could Do Better Than That feeling towards the speedruns, although I inconveniently lack a computer-with-proper-OS in which to in fact set a new WR in the category.)

whats everyones first video game (criteria can be whatever you want but im going for the first game i remember playing as a kid) mine's harvest moon friends of mineral town

[moonlit-tulip]

whats everyones first video game (criteria can be whatever you want but im going for the first game i remember playing as a kid) mine's harvest moon friends of mineral town

[moonlit-tulip]

Translation as Re-Compression

Translators often talk about the impossibility of producing a single perfect translation of a work, capturing all its nuance and sounding fully natural in its newly-translated form.

Non-translators often find this unintuitive.

As an intuition-aid, then: consider it through the lens of compression algorithms.

Language is a form of lossy compression which can be applied to thought in order to format it for communication with others. We have large-and-many-layered thoughts which we render into words, losing a lot of their nuance in the process.

Different languages compress the same thoughts differently, losing and keeping different details. For example, English defaults to bundling information on people's genders in with many third-person references to those people, while Japanese does a lot less of that; Japanese, meanwhile, defaults to bundling information on siblings' relative ages in many references to their siblinghood, while English does a lot less of that.

This leads to a serious problem for translators. Because it leaves them two major choices.

The first choice: take the original language—already an output of a lossy compression-process—and run further lossy compression on it in order to convert it to the target language in reasonably-efficiently-packed form. At the cost of this further loss-of-information, you can have the information that is left come out reasonably well-compressed and thus easy to consume in the new language.

The second choice: take the original language and translate it with as little further loss as possible, even at the cost of compression-efficiency. Translate every Japanese 'imouto' to 'little sister', and not just 'sister', even if the result sounds stiltedly redundant in English, because otherwise information from the Japanese will be lost. Thereby, preserve as much of the original work's content as possible, but in a far-less-efficient form in the target language than in the source language.

(As a somewhat-more-specific analogy, for those who happen to be familiar with music formats: MP3-to-AAC conversion versus MP3-to-FLAC conversion. The former is a lossy conversion of an already-lossy format; it produces an AAC which has lost information relative to the source MP3, but takes up similarly-little space. The latter is a lossless conversion of its lossy source material, so lacks that degradation-of-output-quality, but in exchange it takes up a lot more space than the AAC output would have and a lot more space than the original MP3 did.)

Notably, however, it leads to a lot less problem for original creators producing versions of a work in multiple languages. Because they're not working from a lossy base: they have access to the original thoughts which the work is a lossily-compressed rendition of. And so they can, with relative freedom, create multiple equally-compressed renditions of those thoughts with only partial overlap, rather than one being constrained to have its content be a strict subset of the other. (Like, to continue the prior analogy, converting a lossless source-file both to MP3 and to AAC, such that both output-files are well-compressed and neither output-file is unambiguously behind the other in terms of net information retained.)

Those two choices map pretty closely onto the frequently-discussed-by-translators tradeoff between translations tuned to flow well and sound good in the target language and translations tuned to preserve the full detailed nuance of the source language. But I think the compression framing can be helpful in understanding exactly why it's a forced tradeoff, why there's no magical perfect translation which succeeds in both of those goals at once. It's not just an issue of translation-skill; there are fundamental information-theoretic limits at play.

(The third option, the technically-not-translation route of the original creator producing the work multiple times in different languages from their original source thoughts and thus bypassing the tradeoff between the prior two choices, isn't one I've seen talked about as much, likely because creators with the necessary level of skill in multiple languages to pull it off are relatively rare.)

[moonlit-tulip]

I suspect you're underweighting the value of "make this story-originally-told-in-medium-A accessible to people who have a hard time consuming medium A but have an easier time consuming medium-to-which-I'm-adapting-it B" as an artistic vision. I agree that one does need vision, and that divergent-but-still-grounded-in-the-source-material visions like (for example) the Baccano! anime's differences-of-presentational-style from its source novels can work very well; but the increasing-accessibility-to-fans-of-alternate-media one strikes me as a pretty good vision too! Very much sufficient to justify an adaptation. It's not for no reason that highly-faithful manga-to-anime adaptations often bring in pretty big new audiences to their associated stories, even when they're hugging very closely to the source manga and deliberately avoiding taking it in new directions.

"this is an inaccurate adaptation" okay but is it good "this didn't happen in the book" does it make sense in the context of the new work though "they totally changed the plot" and is the new one good or bad "it's completely different" not what I asked "they changed all the stuff I like" then I get why you wouldn't be into it but I'm asking about its own artistic merits "this character is meant to be blonde" I couldn't give less of a fuck

[moonlit-tulip]

Over time, I'm growing increasingly convinced that a lot of the craft underlying what people-into-storytelling call 'writing' isn't actually really about writing at all, and it would be useful for many people—me included—to swap over to some different term, like maybe 'storytelling'.

Because, in my experience, the goals pursued by me and by most of the people in my fiction-creation-focused social circles aren't particularly constrained to what's easy to render in prose. They're much more about conveying things to audiences, in ways which prose can certainly be helpful for but which other things can also be helpful for.

To bring up a topical example: Deltarune is a game which is very effective at its storytelling, able to deliver high-impact moments at pretty high density. And it's true that a decent chunk of that is down to being well-written; Toby Fox is, in fact, a pretty skilled wordsmith. But a lot of it is also down to other things: music, art and animation, timing, et cetera. The writing is just one component of many in the overall soup of Factors Behind Deltarune Being Good.

As such, it strikes me as worthwhile to view a lot of the skills traditionally touted as writing skills—plotting, characterization, pacing, et cetera—as, instead, more general storytelling skills. Skills which are more specifically writing skills still very much exist—various elements of how to write good prose, good dialogue, et cetera—but they're not the main mass of what most people are thinking of when they talk about writing skill. The main mass of 'writing' skills apply just as well to such things as text-free comics, voice-free animation, silent-protagonist-explores-abandoned-ruins games, and so forth, even if they're made without any writing-per-se involved in the process at all.

There are many tools which can help with telling a given story. Writing is one. But the writing isn't the story; it's just a medium through which the story can be conveyed. The difference is important.

[moonlit-tulip]

You Are Your Own Greatest Tool

Most people have goals which they try to pursue.

Some of these are simple short-term goals, like eating a meal this evening. Some of these are ambitious long-term goals, like the extinction of smallpox. But they all share the trait of being outcomes which people value and are inclined to try to bring about.

Pursuit of goals is often helped along by tools. Pots and dishes can help with meal-eating, for instance, as can money or seedcorn with which to acquire food to put in those pots and dishes. Vaccines, and money with which to arrange the vaccines' spread, can help with smallpox-eradication. Et cetera.

Tools are good and useful things. Worthwhile to acquire and collect; worthwhile to maintain and keep in good condition; worthwhile, if one uses them particularly intensively, to upgrade and modify and otherwise customize to one's individual needs.

People often take an overly narrow view of what tools are in their possession, in this regard. Tangible things like pots and dishes and money and seedcorn and vaccines can be good tools, sure; but so, too, can intangible things like reputation and knowledge and beauty and so on. Anything capable of bringing about effects in the world can be wielded as a tool towards some ends.

And so, when one looks closely enough, the conclusion becomes inevitable that one's greatest tool is oneself. Because one uses oneself every time one pursues any goal at all. It's a prerequisite, for me eat a meal, that there be an 'I' capable of eating. If I were to try to help along the end of smallpox... well, once again, there's that 'I'! If I'm not there, I can't help with it. (As in fact I wasn't and couldn't, in the actual event of smallpox's eradication.)

It's on this ground that I spend as much of my time and energy as I do trying to become better at things. At skills which directly help me accomplish my goals, like eating hot food without burning my mouth in the process; at skills which indirectly help me accomplish my goals, like software-engineering in order to make money and in order to make software which does things I find useful; at skills which help me improve my ability to learn the aforementioned skills, like how to allocate my time and energy effectively towards ends I value and how to distinguish truth from falsehood and thus not convince myself that things will accomplish my goals when they won't or vice versa; at knowing as much as I can about as many things I can, because the more I know about the world the likelier I am to have a bit of information relevant to helping myself efficiently accomplish the particular tasks in front of me; and so on and so forth.

Because I'm the tool I use most often, more than any other. Making sure I'm in good condition pays off.

I think many people would benefit from taking a similar view towards themselves.

[moonlit-tulip]

now that deltarune chapters 3-4 are nearly out, I've been rereading the original novels. they're surprisingly close to the games, here's Noelle from book 2

[moonlit-tulip]

For a list-by-someone-else I've found helpful as inspiration in the past, I'd point you at https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/; not everything there is specifically about spending money, but a lot of it is, and it points at a lot of good options which are probably not obvious to most people.

For a more personal list of things I've found worthwhile to spend money on for quality-of-life purposes:

Subscriptions to useful online services, including Kagi for search, MEGA Pro for general-purpose cloud-file-storage with sync functionality, and Obsidian Sync for narrower-but-with-nicer-UI cross-device-synced notetaking.

Custom-print clothing and mousepads and wall-art and so forth for my physical environment, and custom icons and banners and so forth with which to decorate my web-presence, to increase my baseline levels of aesthetic fulfillment. Art commissions, or subscriptions to paid high-quality AI-art tools like Midjourney, on the backend to produce the images to be printed-or-used-online.

Good-quality hardware in places where I used to use cheaper-and-lower-quality stuff: nice boots, a nice keyboard, a nice set of bowls to eat from, et cetera. For figuring out what to get, I've found The Wirecutter and Consumer Reports to both be pretty good as quick summaries of products-which-will-probably-be-at-least-reasonably-nice in a given field; they're not a substitute for deep ten-hour research-dives into the opinions of enthusiast communities, but they've worked a lot better for me, in cases where I don't feel like doing the full research-dive, than e.g. plain searching-by-Amazon-reviews has. (Consumer Reports is paid-subscription-gated; I find it to yield enough useful information that it would be worth the cost, if I needed to pay the cost; but, also, at least if you're in the US (I don't know about patterns elsewhere) there's a decent chance your local public library offers free access via their website. All three of the library systems I've belonged to throughout my life so far have done so.)

A cheap one-time cost, won't be a good long-run money-sink, but: side-cut can openers (example) are much nicer than the top-cut ones I grew up with. They cut the top off the can in such a way as to leave it (a) free of sharp edges and (b) shaped in such a way as to be easily re-placed on top of the can as a decently-effectively-sealing lid, while also (c) not getting their cutting-blades dirty with can-contents and thus saving on cleaning-effort. If you don't already have one, I recommend getting one.

When uncertain about whether I'll like a given good or service, erring on the side of "try it out and see how I like it" rather than erring on the side of "don't spend money on things I'm not confident will pay off"; it's one of those things I was always very hesitant to do, when I had less money, but has been pretty solidly good-for-me since I acquired more money and got into the habit, because not-too-rarely it turns out that I do like a given thing a bunch.

Can anyone recommend quality of life boosters one might spend on?

All my hobbies are far more time intensive than money intensive so I don't actually have much of a way to go through money, and no clear ideas for how to treat myself.

[moonlit-tulip]

I have this feeling about ignoring people, on platforms which support that—if someone is unpleasant to read, then I can hit the button and stop having stuff-from-them show up in my reading-zone except when I specifically seek it out, and that can be nice—but I tend to be a lot more averse to blocking in the "be invisible to them too" sense, because I'd rather not prevent people-who-are-unpleasant-to-read from reading my stuff, generally. There are very few people in this world who I specifically want to not be perceived by, as opposed to just to not perceive, and it's unfortunate that so many sites package those two functionalities together inextricably; it adds an extra cost, in foregone benefit-to-them from reading my stuff, counteracting the benefit in foregone cost-to-me from reading theirs.

It feels so good to block people. Someone annoys you can you can just say "hey, I don't want to ever have your input on anything ever again" and with a single click, it's done? It's a social fantasy that the real world can only dream of one day fulfilling.

[moonlit-tulip]

This is straightforwardly sensible and correct of the IME! I occasionally get annoyed at my Japanese-to-English dictionary of choice, jpdb, for its unreliability at properly parsing that input-format.

The trick is that, while Romanizations in that style—the Nihon-shiki Romanization style—are less accurate to how those words are pronounced in English than the more familiar 'chuuni' / 'roumaji' / etc. produced by Hepburn-shiki, they're more accurate to the underlying Japanese phonology. Phonemic rather than phonetic. Or, to put it in less technical linguistic terms: they're using one letter for each set of sounds which sound like 'the same sound' to native Japanese-speakers in the same way that, for example, the 't' at the start of 'terror' and the 't' in the middle of 'motive' sound 'the same' to English-speakers despite being in fact pretty different in their physical articulation and acoustic characteristics (and despite the second one bearing more resemblance to the Japanese sound generally Romanized as 'r' than to the Japanese sound generally Romanized as 't').

As such, while Nihon-shiki Romanizations are less good than Hepburn-shiki ones when trying to render Japanese words to be phonetically clear to English-speaking audiences, such as in Japanese-to-English translation or loanword-generation, they strike me as pretty straightforwardly simpler-and-thereby-better when just trying to do input which is then going to be read as Japanese, such as the typical IME input. Because, when targeting a Japanese-speaking audience (or a Japanese-speaking computer-system), your audience isn't likely to care about the nuances of pronunciation the Hepburn Romanization emphasizes very much more than typical English-speaking audiences or computer-systems are to care about the differences of pronunciation between those two 't' sounds; it's just extra unnecessary detail to keep track of, for both the writer and the reader.

the fact that IME accepts tyuuni is fucked up. evil.

[moonlit-tulip]

Hey! Any progress on the better ereader?

The project went on hiatus for a while due to the code spaghettifying and needing a substantial revision to stay maintainable, then went on un-hiatus for a little while when I decided to try messing with an alternate reimplementation-from-scratch where it's a command-line tool rather than a browser extension, and then went on hiatus again when my job took a turn towards instability and my personal-career-development-time that previously went into ebook-related coding projects started going into job-hunting instead. I don't know when I'll get back to it next; it does remain an item on my agenda, though.