#Accidental Intelligence

[geethr75]

SPSFC First Chapter Reads Day 6

Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin Blurb TALES FROM THE QUANTUM VAULT In his debut novel, Bryan Chaffin transports us to the year 2139, where corporate combines have their own Senate seats, the surveillance-state is all-encompassing, humans live most of their lives in the Omninet, and sentient AIs are partners with the world government. It’s not all bad, though. There are docbots, you…

[phlorealcalicanto]

I just read all of Worm in like a month and I kept frantically reaching for the next chapter thinking surely, SURELY this is the one where the tension between Taylor and Rachel reaches a breaking point and they fuck messy style while some unspeakable calamity happens around them. And it just. never happens. (the fucking I mean, the calamities keep happening a bunch)

[turtleblogatlast]

Unironically think that each of the bros (+April) don’t actually get how impressive their feats really are so they just do what they do and on the off chance someone comments on those feats they all react like:

[tonydaddingham]

(multi-part rb post)

thought of the morning: crowley has done quite a few objectively good/right things and presumably has not been noticed and subsequently gone unpunished by hell for it... so what is different in the resurrectionist minisode?

because aziraphale calls attention to it? sort of like this?:

i think my day is going to be spent looking back over each time crowley has shouted aziraphale down whenever he calls him nice or kind or w/e, because this? suddenly feels more significant than just being uncomfortable with being associated with 'good'...

[xylophone888]

please ignore that the last one is grindr messages :praying_hands_emoji:

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Would that mean Ajax has an unusually vested interest in the other nations after everything in Liyue is sorted? Like- keeping an eye on the Gunnhilder clan, or the Ragvindr’s? Would he have a vested interest in seeing the Dawn Winery form and thrive? Would he keep an eye out for news from Inazuma about the Kamisatos, Kaedehara clan, and how the Yokai are doing? There’s a lot of funky things Ajax could be tracking and or meddling with and I love that for him

oh absolutely. ajax would find a way to build himself a little news chain just to keep up on Blorbo Release Dates and accidentally install the greatest intelligence gathering network in teyvat

and like- nobody would realize at first since it'd happen so slowly, but by one point some couple of centuries down the line guizhong would be like- sorry, how do you know this? and ajax would just cassually drop that ah yes [instert someone's name here] told him and guizhong and morax would sit there like. who- who's that and ajax would drop the whole oh y'know i made some friends, i got some people to pass me some info back, usual stuff and guizhong would stare bc ajax is just casually revealing he has created a both open-secret yet completely unknown network of entirely random individuals who just- pass gossip along, and it all eventually goes back to ajax. most of that network is made up of volchiy travelers who pick up info on the coasts and directly report back to him.

[prussianbluevelvet]

As a leftist, having ‘good intentions’ is not enough.

You need to be fucking educated.

Your intentions mean NOTHING, without accurate knowledge and education abt minorities, you’re just doomed to repeat harmful propaganda without A) being able to spot it and B) more prone to justifying your bigotry and biases via ‘I’m trying to be morally correct so I’ll just believe whatever makes me feel good 🥺🥺🥺’ which just results in you confirming and perpetrating you own biases.

Like… I have a migraine now. I just spent 2 HOURS explaining the history of antisemitism in europe to my mum and educating her about jewish stereotypes and the history/cultural context behind it cause she’s a typical well-meaning-but uneducated leftist who thinks that spewing antisemitic rhetoric is somehow ‘helping Palestine’ i think the fuck not! bitch ur literally european how the fuck are you NOT familiar with the BS myths and legends behind antisemitism… thought it was common knowledge but I suppose people are generally less educated than i thought????? ugh.

Being a leftist doesn’t automatically make you a good person, or ‘correct’ or even morally correct.

You gotta actually fucking learn about history, and various cultures, and the context behind different types of bigotry if you want to avoid repeating it.

Everybody thinks they’re ‘morally correct’. Nazis think their actions are morally justifiable.

Being a leftist isn’t about being ‘morally correct’.

[vvitchering]

This excerpt from the letter Elminster sends to God!Gale post game has had me in a sadness chokehold for DAYS. I knew Gale was young when he was scouted as a new potential Chosen but he was EIGHT??? Eight years old. A child. A baby. And he was accidentally destroying property with fireballs that young? That boy was a sorcerer. The way that one moment changed the trajectory of his entire life.

Elminster watched a little boy cry over ruined flowers and so many years later finally feels regret.

[soup-of-the-daisies]

to name your firstborn son after the loyal dog (man’s best friend) (man’s companion) (man’s tool) who accompanied the hunter you were named after (killed for something not his fault) (killed for competency) (killed by the gods for catching a goddess’ eye) to the night sky for eternity, forever chasing, forever hunting, never catching- is, in all honesty, exactly the kind of dramatic and theatrical arrogant shit you’d expect from a black

[g1deonthefirst]

wasn't alfred a hedge fund manager? i get where ur coming from re: the class divide post otherwise btw but am somewhat stumped ab this bc he was definitely the one making the most money and likely highly educated as well, and ended up a cav. ig it is STEM/nonSTEM divide?

hi! yes, alfred was a hedge fund manager — he was also augustine's brother and so comes from a similar (presumably very wealthy) background. this exception doesn't really disprove the rule to me: either way, john was disproportionately likely to make people who were highly educated necromancers and people who were not cavaliers. i want to walk through a couple possible reasons for this.

the first possibility is that john (1) believed that people who were more "intelligent" were more likely to be able to understand necromancy and (2) implicitly believed that people who were academically high-achieving like scientists, lawyers, doctors, etc. were more "intelligent." clearly, john and the lyctors all seem to think pretty highly of their own intelligence. john in particular went from being a poor māori kid to being an accomplished scientist, and i don't think it's a stretch to say he probably believed he deserved it on the basis of intelligence.

in contrast, both alfred and cristabel have their own talents and intelligence disparaged — john describes alfred as "useless, but a darling" and augustine describes cristabel as "not hav[ing] the intellect you'd ordinarily find in a sandwich or an orange." additionally, necromancy is talked about in scientific terms, which lends itself to the idea that you might need some scientific understanding to be good at it. i think it's entirely possible that john consciously decided that some people wouldn't be intelligent enough to hack it and made them the cavaliers, a problematic assumption chiefly in that it equates academic achievement with innate intelligence.

the second possibility, and to me the more likely one, is that john simply made the people closest to him necromancers while making people he wasn't as close to (essentially his friends' friends) non-necromancers. it's pretty clear that the people john made necromancers were people who directly worked on john's original cryogenics project with him, while the cavaliers were all people who got dragged into his cult by those original project members. alfred is a perfect example of this — he's there because he's augustine's brother. other people have made posts about the possibility that john did this to intentionally separate his friends from the people they loved.

but either way, i think this demonstrates who john as a character cared about. john, as a successful scientist, surrounded himself by people who were highly educated and successful, predominantly (as you note anon) people in STEM. people who are disproportionately likely to be white, neurotypical, and cis, or at least disproportionately likely to be able to conform to white/european, neurotypical, cis standards. not only is john not as close to people in his project-turned-cult that aren't as highly educated, but poor people aren't present at all. there are no janitors, no retail workers, no manual laborers, no farmworkers. i don't get the sense that john ever really unpacked his internalized biases or questioned why he primarily values people who are highly educated.

"but," i imagine my hypothetical reader who's somehow made it this far protesting, "of course he's surrounded by highly educated people. he's working on a cryogenics project!" well...precisely. tumblr user sophelstien's scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds essay touches on how this project demonstrates that john is not as progressive as some people assume he is, but what i'll say here is simply that john didn't have to make the people in his cryogenics project the leaders of his new society. and by installing the very people who our society rewards into positions of power, john — consciously or not — shapes the new society he's creating with the old society's inequalities.

[some-pers0n]

Every once in a while I think about the ship I've been obsessed over for close to two years now and feel like I'm ascending to another plane of reality. Like sometimes you just encounter a ship that hits every single mark and is perfect in every regard and you're left stunned how something like that can even exist

[undergroundwubwubmaster]

Triton fighter called Barb i played for a oneshot!

He was very fun, hoping to switch him into a barbarian (Barb the barbarian, get it?) and use him as an NPC for games in the future.

[archivist-the-knight]

love how the entire slimecicle bg3 gang is like really smart they're also all just. actually im exploring this

xiv is very smart. not only are they an arcane battery, their father likely gave them plenty of books to read about spell-casting. so they're a big thinker. but what stops them from reaching their true potential is the fact that they likely don't allow themselves to properly process their more negative emotions, like rai's death and whatnot. and they're... literally going through this entire adventure after escaping an incredibly toxic and neglectful environment. they're probably trying to push back how their father was a piece of shit as well and its not working because their dream visitor IS their father!! so they know their way around a book but don't know how to deal with their father screaming from the other room :-3

tal i think is very aware of others feelings, and partially emotionally intelligent for himself. he tries to talk rai down before he's forced to kill him, being kind to him in rai's final moments of lucidity. he understand's something wrong with xiv, that there's something they aren't telling the rest of the group, but he doesn't wanna pry. in terms of more "intellectual intelligence" i think he is smart but just... doesn't know how to articulate it. he can do it, but unlike xiv he literally cannot explain it to you. it's like how he mispronounced monotonous; he knows of it, he just forgot the pronunciation. basically him and xiv are kind of inverses of each other; xiv is smart and can explain it, but can't deal with their emotions. tal can recongize his and others emotions, and while being a bit smart he can't explain it like xiv can and forgets the information sometime. another thing i think they have in common is accidentally lashing out in anger. tal doesn't know why (not a violent dog; doesn't know why he bites) and xiv knows but wishes they didnt (violent dog; wishes they didn't know why they bite.)

klip. i'm gonna be honest i think he's the most normal in the group and that is genuinely saying something. he's about average in terms of emotional and intelectual intelligence, but. the way he reacts to rai being weird is touching the book thats glowing ominously, but at the same time checking to see if he's okay. it's like he's barely passed the skillcheck, and thus while it's good, there are aspects of it he's missing. its not the fact that he can't read the room, its the fact that he can read parts of it. the rest of it he realizes depending on the person's reaction. im 50/50 on whether or not he harbors a bit of guilt from not actually defeating that goblin camp but this again. is klip we're talking about. surprisingly the most well adjusted of the group despite the squidfucking.

now rai... i think rai. thinks he's well adjusted but oh. isn't. i think its the book that makes him realize he craves a family more than anything. but its really too late to change anything is it. and just god... rai's death was so fucked man. he didn't even get to learn anything about his parents, we didnt get to learn anything about his parents, before he died. its so... goddd its fucked. anyway yeah. rai thinks he is. the book reminds him so coldly and cruelly that he isnt <333

all of that to say. just because they're dumbasses does not mean they're stupid. also @flammablefaerie the bread is here

[ranger-danger]

Y’know when I first got The Chrystal Shard I was like “I wonder if Joyce and Drizzt would get along” because I like thinking about rangers. But then I started reading it and went “oh, Never mind. They might as well be cousins.”

Let’s see:

rarer mistreated race ✅

double wields scimitars ✅

follower of mielikki ✅

was shown to mielikki by another ranger ✅

Seems to enjoy & seek danger to feel truly alive ✅

Like I didn’t know about Drizzt when I made Joyce a long while back. But like. The accidental similarities still make me feel kinda shocked. Is Joyce a ripoff of Drizzt? Can you make a rip-off accidentally?

[johndonneswife]

Hi!!! should I watch Lost since it’s on Netflix or is it like your SPN show? thanks!

MY show? 😭😭😭😭😭 pls girl don’t start with me

okay so i enjoyed and had a great time watching lost. lost gave me characters like desmond hume and juliet burke. hello… here is what i would say:

lost = good show sometimes plagued with bad writing with an audience too fucking stupid to understand it…ugh

spn = bad show where there was *sometimes* some *completely fucking accidental* good writing with an audience simultaneously too smart and way too fucking stupid for it. usually too stupid. it’s fucking bad okay!

[diffenbachiae]

it’s time for LIZZIE’S SOCIAL SKILL OF 2023: this year i learned that when you see someone you know you can wave or smile instead of saying hi if you or the person are already engaged in a conversation! you DO have to acknowledge them if you make eye contact but it doesn’t HAVE to necessarily be verbal. if you don’t make eye contact you are allowed to pretend you didn’t see them until it’s the proper time to say hi. if this was already obvious to you good for you but for me this has been a GAME CHANGER