Comment author: Tiiba2 06 February 2009 02:58:52PM 8 points [-]

1) Who the hell is Master of Fandom? A guy who maintains the climate control system, or the crew's pet Gundam nerd?

2) Do you really think the aliens' deal is so horrifying? Or are you just overdramatizing?

Comment author: Auroch 31 December 2010 04:23:10AM 7 points [-]

1) The master of the ship's internet-equivalent, probably

In response to Initiation Ceremony
Comment author: Caledonian2 28 March 2008 11:42:42PM 6 points [-]

Yes, I want to know," said Brennan. "Know what, exactly?" whispered the figure. Brennan's face scrunched up in concentration, trying to visualize the game to its end, and hoping he hadn't blown it already; until finally he fell back on the first and last resort, which is the truth: "It doesn't matter," said Brennan, "the answer is still yes."

If you don't care what you know, as long as you know it, you'd be better off studying theology. I have some crystals and tarot cards you'll probably want to purchase, too.

Comment author: Auroch 30 December 2010 09:36:51PM 13 points [-]

That isn't "knowing" something. That's believing it.

Comment author: gwern 01 August 2009 08:07:09AM 10 points [-]

Does that actually work?

(I can't decide whether that would mean Morrowind's game mechanics are broken, or just really awesome.)

Comment author: Auroch 30 December 2010 09:29:33PM 12 points [-]

Yes, and both.

It is also possible to increase your jumping to such a high level that you jump across the continent in one leap. However, the spell wears off before you have crossed halfway, so you have to refresh it just before landing in order to not die on impact.

Comment author: Cirne 13 December 2010 07:14:51PM 8 points [-]

Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven't played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It's an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence "The gostak distims the doshes" allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.

The core of language and communication is common convention. If your intent is to create a visually-pleasing pattern of pixels on a screen or ink on paper, you can change any part of your writing you like. You can change every word to a made-up word that only uses half-height letters, use the capital X as your sentence-ending punctuation, and as long as the story is internally consistent, people could still conceivably generate meaning from it. If they try hard enough, they might even generate the meaning you intended, but you would by necessity have a smaller audience.

Is your primary goal to communicate your ideas to others using a common language, or is it to create visual artwork? No matter your personal feelings on the aesthetics of different parts of the language, if you violate conventions, all you're doing is harming the former in favor of the latter.

Comment author: Auroch 30 December 2010 09:17:29PM 1 point [-]

This viewpoint assumes that this convention makes it easier to communicate ideas. This is not true a priori, and certainly false for some conventions (that against splitting infinitives for instance).

In this case, I think you are wrong and that the convention is not sufficiently widely known/accepted to aid in communication.