Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Searle's Chinese Escape Room

 

But yeah, if I were a stag I would totally end up with a spiderweb running across my antlers and not notice at all.

 

Once again reminded that I only win board games by chance (and occasional sabotage).

 

Going back to my spectrality post, I probably actually shouldn't say that I'm A_∞, given that part of my complex appears to be minor dissociation, and I'm pretty sure even claiming "it's only up to homotopy" doesn't actually make the term more accurate.

 

But surely if there were a better axiom than the Efficient Market Hypothesis, someone would have thought of it by now. [/sarcasm]

 

A scene that I wanted to put into Lady Weirwood but couldn't find a good way to tie it in because of POV issues.

Spoiler: Violence

He flees into the Godswood, the only place that the guards will not immediately find him. Deeper and deeper he runs, knowing that his salvation is the wall on the far side, that was never quite repaired properly and can still be climbed.
But as he reaches the heart tree, a figure appears.
"Away, woman!" he roars, and tries to push her aside, but his hands touch nothing but air, and still she stands before him. To his horror, he realizes he can see the snowflakes passing through her to the ground, and he can see the heart tree's baneful glare behind her as if she were made of glass. And he remembers all of the tales he has heard of the Winterfell Godswood, where the Old Gods are closer to the world than in any other.
She reaches out a hand to his face as if to caress his cheek, but it passes through, although his skin tingles with cold where her fingers touch him.
"My lord. You have betrayed your liege. You have knowingly and willingly brought pain unto the House of Stark, the House of your King. And for that, you are sentenced to death."
Her eyes burn, bright and cold and as merciless as the face on the heart tree.
"I have no sword to swing upon your neck,"
Slowly she lowers her arm, the chill following, rendering him immobile, rooted in place as surely as the trees.
"but our ways are still the Old Ways."
He tries to speak, tries to unfreeze his tongue, to demand, to plead, to beg or bribe or
A sharp pain bursts from within his chest, as if he has been stabbed from the inside. And as his vision fades, the last thing he sees is the snow accumulating in her hair.

 

Sudden realization that I don't actually have a clear idea of what "autistic hand flapping" specifically entails. I have almost certainly seen it, but I have no recognition or differentiation of it from other behaviors that could be justifiably labeled "hand flapping". I don't even know if it is distinguishable from the outside.

 

After days at sea, sailing east, always east, past the islands of sunrise, past the deep currents and the fathomless blue emptiness, you reach it. The Wall.
Dark stone, as high as the sky and as deep as any have ever gone. It stretches north until the water turns to ice and south until the sun burns away the clouds, and farther still if the travelers' tales are to be believed. None have ever crossed the Wall, for no end to it has ever been found.
And if one crosses all the lands to the west, and across the waters there, they say there is another Wall just like it, as if your entire world is enclosed. But the mathematicians say that the world is round, and thus the world is not enclosed by the Wall, but kept outside it, barred forever from what lies within.
With a nod to the ship's captain, you clamber into a small rowboat and make your way closer. You will be the first, you are sure, to truly see the Wall, to understand it. The Wall has existed for as long as history, perhaps as long as humanity, but you will be the first.
As you draw up to the Wall, you see glinting metal, gleaming plates spaced a man's height apart, tiling the wall into the distance. Even closer, you can see that they all look the same, embossed with words in the Old Tongue. These plates too have been reported by sailors and wanderers, but none thought to try to decipher them. Not until you. You spent years tracking down the old scroll that sits beside you, the only remaining copy of Translations of Elder Speech, the last means of reading the Old Tongue.
Finally, finally you are close enough to reach out a hand, running it along a plate to find it surprisingly warm, despite the sun being far away.
Something is wrong. Perhaps there is a reason no one has tried to even bring back a copy of the plate's symbols.
But you didn't come here just to turn back. You unroll Translations and fortify yourself. You will know. The world will know.
And so you begin to read:
"This is not a place of honor..."

 

But what is the name of the Deep State University football team?

 

I could do this properly, or I could just write a bunch of nested for loops.

 

When you think you have a bothersome result but fortunately it turns out to be just a silent buffer overflow.

 

Not to imply that the original is particularly good, but there's something incredibly bland, to the point of being almost painful, about a soulful acoustic cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" sung by a dude.

 

Never mind the Turing Test, how many AIs can pass the mirror test?

 

If I were the kind of person to deliberately spread conspiracy theories, I'd tell people that CP2077 was deliberately programmed to brick consoles as part of a deal with Sony and Microsoft to force people to buy next gen hardware.

Unfortunately, I have a very specific "I am lying to you for entertainment" voice that I use in meatspace which I've trained all of my friends to notice and it's hard to translate that as well into pure text.

 

Following up on my remark about Gundam designs, one thing I really appreciated from the early Gundam series was the use of Mobile Armors, which made no pretense of being humanoid. In particular, appreciation for the RX-78 GP03 Dendrobium, which in its full form was just a giant set of missile racks, guns, and thrusters, with a pair of arms carrying beam sabers because you have to. But no legs, no torso, no head.
I mean, technically there was the Stamen portion, but bringing that up would be like saying that a truck is humanoid because it's got a human-shaped driver.

 

Like vertigo but horizontal

 

It turns out that chocolate chip waffles are actually not too bad for making sandwiches with. I guess the ham is already pretty sweet, so it's not too jarring to have the chocolate chips as well.

 

Every time I read about or hear about someone going for a GED instead of finishing high school, I think about the time when my mom and I thought about taking that path for me. Not for the usual reasons one might go for a GED, but because high school honestly had very little to offer me academically at the time and we weren't sure that they would let me go early if I didn't just drop out.
Thinking back to it, though, another year of high-school might have been able to teach me to write decent essays. I got through my humanities classes via a combination of a natural ability to bullshit and my mom yelling at me to actually sit down and write, but I never really learned to frame an argument coherently. If you read math papers, you'll see that they're generally awful unless they can afford to be pithy; theorem, proof, theorem, proof, occasional remark or corollary, and the organization is often closer to spaghetti code than one would hope. Yes, math is logical and all, but math papers haven't figured out that the GOTO command is a bug, not a feature.
But I got good grades in my high school humanities classes because I could bullshit well and could retain just enough facts that I could piece together something that sounded like an argument and I was happy to chat with the teachers, even if nothing I said was of deliberate substance, and so it was decided that I was good enough at humanities and the high school let me go. It didn't help that I was also starting to become a logistical headache.
I heard afterwards that I've become a model for people who want to graduate early from my high school, which is good. The school is big enough that there are inevitably one or two students each year who can aren't getting anything out of staying for all four years, and getting a GED is certainly not the same as getting an early diploma.

 

The problem with buying socks all at once is that they develop holes all at once.

 

I can't quite figure out how to make the joke work properly, but I want to do something with Grey Wind's head sewed on to Robb Stark's body encountering Jon Snow and addressing him as "Ed...dard..."