megmogandog

Wow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least.

Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.

I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.

I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.

The loss of color is concerning, but something I find interesting is the image the author chooses to illustrate Loos' quote, "We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." I would argue the building pictured falls short of this goal in important ways. A lot of contemporary architecture lacks the modernist commitment to flat planes, pure volumes, etc. and adds lazy and useless decorative/textural elements. The building pictured would look better if it was less adorned! (But even better with some color)

The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.

Yes, this understanding would mean the 12-bar blues and blues music in general are an extremely dissonant form as they use the dominant seven chords as tonics.

How many people consider the blues dissonant?

It reminds me of my first counterpoint assignment. "Fourths aren't dissonant" I said, and it came back covered in red marks

I tried to learn LilyPond once but it was a bit too arcane for my taste. Now I use MuseScore, WYSIWYG notation program which is a lot more intuitive (and, like LilyPond, also released under the GPL).

I write relatively simple music, though, mostly lead sheets. I always imagined LilyPond would shine in more complex scoring situations.

I'm curious why you would want 4K in this case? I was over at a family member's place and threw on an episode of TNG to kill time. I was trying to figure out why everything looked so cheap: Picard's uniform, other costumes, the alien makeup. It was because they'd increased the definition past what the sets, costumes, and makeup were designed for. Personally I prefer the fuzzy look which appears more 'realistic' to me.

I share your experience and would like to make an unsolicited recommendation of a recent movie that's stuck with me more than anything else I've seen in the last few years: First Reformed. Give it a shot!

I think I could've phrased my comment better.

I'm not assuming the constants can be changed; axiomatically, they cannot, because they're fundamental constants of the universe. I'm also not assuming that some agent was around to do the tuning. In its basic form 'fine tuning' just means that if one of the values were even slightly different we wouldn't have anything like the universe we see today, including life. The values of the constants appear as if they were tuned.

It's interesting you bring up evolution, because before that theory came about intelligent design was a reasonable assumption in trying to explain how well-adapted organisms seemed to be to their environments. It was as if someone had designed them for their roles! As it turns out the theory of evolution satisfactorily explains why organisms exhibit the appearance of design.

In a similar way the fundamental constants exhibit the appearance of having been precisely set. It's hard to imagine a scientific theory getting 'behind' the constants the way evolution was able to get 'behind' the appearance of organisms...

Which fine tuning arguments are you referring to?

As I understand it, 'fine tuning' is simply a fact of the universe: that the fundamental constants have values that allow for the emergence of complexity, and that even slight changes to those values would lead to homogeneous and featureless universe. I don't have the physics background to demonstrate this for myself, but I believe it.

To then reason from that fact to the existence of a multiverse or the existence of God is an extra step that one need not take, but not taking either of those steps doesn't invalidate the appearance that the fundamental constants of the universe were fine tuned for the production of complexity/life.

It's a fantastic game, I had a blast playing through it twice, first 'unspoiled', then following a guide to get all the characters.

I wish there were more JRPGs that took such a maximalist approach to how many playable characters you get

Yes, quite contrary to my expectations. The phrase isn't even used outside of the title. I always knew it only as a Dune reference; was the actual spice trade ever described in such terms?

Watched a bit of the demo video. Maybe I'm not the target audience but is this kind of an emacs approach to the terminal, in the sense of trying to put every possible graphical function into a TUI? For me at least the charm of TUIs is their graphical and functional simplicity, and if I wanted complex animations and layering and whatever all else that is I would look elsewhere... still cool though

Look at the issues discussed: gender roles, race/immigration. Conservative means traditional gender roles, immigration as a negative/threat. Liberal means the opposite. For me at least that's comprehensible and unambiguous outside the US as well

My favorite thing about this link was seeing that the letter Y evolved from a bird hieroglyph! 𓅱𓅱𓅱 (your unicode support may vary)

My personal worst experience of this was Philip K. Dick's Time out of Joint; since then I only read the blurbs after I'm finished.

I didn't read the comment you're replying to as endorsing Meta's actions, but rather stating that it is the only thing you should expect given the current lack of regulation.