1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
colonel-kira-nerys
hekate1308

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
    - Isaac Asimov, Runaround (1942)

“’You must tell them, but if you do, you hurt, so you mustn’t; but if you do, you hurt, so you must; but -’
(…) Herbie collapsed into a huddled heap of motionless metal.
Bogert’s face was bloodless. ‘He’s dead!”
‘No!’ Susan Calvin burst into body-wracking gusts of wild laughter, ‘not dead - merely insane. I confronted him with the insoluble dilema, and he broke down. You can scrap him now - because he’ll never speak again’” 
- Isaac Asimov, Liar! (1941)

Rayna, as an android, obeys the three laws of robotics as conceived by Isaac Asimov. While it’s easy to point out that this could be interpreted as Kirk and Flint giving her contradictory orders, thereby making it impossible to obey the second law, I find it far more interesting that she dies because of her struggle with the first law. 

If she were to go with Kirk, she would hurt Flint; but if she were to stay with Flint, she would hurt Kirk. But she may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Therefore, either action would cause her to break the first law, and she collapses. 

petermorwood
owlmylove

i was ringing up a winter hat for a man the other day and i said “oh, it’s so cute! i love the pom-pom on the top.” and he smiled and agreed and a few seconds later he picked the hat out of the bag and said “you called this a pom-pom?” and i said yes, that’s what i call them, and he explained that he was still learning english before he touched the hat again and said “pom-pom“ in a fascinated voice

petermorwood

English is going to be tricky again.

Here’s a pom-pom…

image

…and here’s a pom-pom (OK, un pompon rouge, so not quite English…)

image

…and here’s a pom-pom and a biretta (you can see where this is going)…

image

Yup. Here’s a pom-pom and a Beretta…

image
image

I’ve seen - and laughed at - the biretta/Beretta mistake in professional print. Spelling matters, specialist spelling in particular, so don’t rely on your copy-editor. A hat is not a gat, but keyboard proximity can make it happen.

These are pom-poms…

image

…and so are these…

image
image

Even without pictures, the difference will be clear in context. A bit like not needing to spell mail as maille… :-P 

prokopetz

computationalcalculator asked:

out of curiosity, what's your favorite "so terrible it loops back around to being good" TTRPG system you've tried?

prokopetz answered:

There are a couple of ways we can take this question.

If we’re talking about games that are bad on purpose, then it’s basically a tie between The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link). The former is a game of competitive bullshitting that’s written entirely in character as the good Baron, and as such tends to ramble, pontificate, and go off on long tangents about nothing in particular - and in the process manages to serve as an excellent primer in the kind of narration that’s required to play. The latter is a deliberate parody of independently published tabletop RPGs that are so high concept they’re essentially unplayable, and while it does an admirable job of being exactly that, it also has some fascinating ideas about the division of responsibilities at the table, a topic I touch on in a previous post.

If we’re talking about games that are bad by accident, I’d have to give it to Continuum. In a nutshell, you play as members of a trans-temporal police organisation, preventing malicious vandalism of history and preparing humanity for the next stage of its social evolution. So far, so good - but then you get to how time travel actually works.

How time travel works in Continuum is like a cross between Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, except played utterly straight. You can do pretty much whatever you want, declaring that your future self shows up to help you, or that your enemy’s trap is actually a double-bluff that you yourself will have set up in the future to trick them into believing they’d trapped you, potentially turning every conflict into an impossible Calvinball-esque snarl of “ah, but I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that…”.

The price is that you actually have to play out that setup later, which your enemies can potentially interfere with in the same way that you did, and you can’t even kill them without causing a paradox due to all the stuff they already will have done. (Well, you can, but then you have to arrange for an actor to impersonate them in order to keep your own timeline intact.)

Like, there’s a formal “time combat” system for this and everything. It’s wonderfully weird, but I have literally never heard of anyone, anywhere, in the entirety of the nearly twenty years since the game’s initial publication who’s managed to successfully play it as written.