Remember that One Time

Remember that one time Metallica made a song that spoke directly to the horror of war and made ya feel feelings about death that are normally inaccessible to the neurotypical mind?  Remember One?  Some of the lyrics were subpar poetry, the obligatory heaviest part was cringey, but if you were in the right / wrong moment in time, it could move you?

Anyway, good thing they never did that again, or I might learn to cry when people die.  Can’t have that.

Seriously tho, a family member on my husband’s side is unconscious in the hospital with slim odds.  I never really knew him, but randomly thought of this song and felt some kind of way.  The guy is a former skateboarder / guitar mans, of the generation that would be into this.  Maybe that’s why it hit me.  Alcoholism is bad shit, my people.

And as to the actual subject of the song, I’d like to rearrange Hegseth’s brains to spell out the words.  All war fans fucking eat shit and die please.  Leave the rest of us in peace.

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Race in High Fantasy

A lot has been said about this subject, and I’m not ambitious enough to even give a proper tour of the topic at the moment.  Of course some shit has been said or done that is various degrees of messed up, and some shit has been done that is very cool.  I bring it up because I have ambitions to make a high fantasy ttrpg, so I need to give it at least some thought.

Race & Racism in High Fantasy

Realism.  Physically diverging appearances within a species are a result of genetic isolation, drift, etc.  Shared ancestry with a lil fork in it.  This suggests that any types of elves and dwarves and orcs should have the same apply to them, in a world where humans have those qualities.  But for long-lived species with half or less the length of a human generation, wouldn’t that process move slower than it does for us?  Also, wouldn’t the existence of black elves suggest strong convergence with humans in a given area?  Melanin has obvious enough geographic selection going on, what about eye shape?

Much like the race-blind casting going on in some stage productions these days, major video games striving to sell the public what it wants have found the path of least resistance is to offer human-like racial variety in all the fantasy creatures with no explanation given.  Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age 4 had a lady dwarf and elf respectively, with racial features of real life East Asian people.

Nice to just say fuck it and play nice with a broader pool of customers, but it does sit a little odd for me with no explanation given.  I can see why they wouldn’t bother.  Racial discourse is so fraught and complicated almost any reason could bring controversy.  Better value to just roll with it.  But I’m not an international business conglomerate growing IP and maximizing profits.  If I’m canceled, it’s lower stakes.  I can just get off the internet and enjoy more personal time.  So I think about it…

Sun in the south makes people get darker skinned, some less obvious factor out east makes people to the east get interesting lookin’ eyes, and something out west makes people lose pigment and go ruddy pink with weird noses.  People in between grade into each other, appearance-wise.  Explained more than the video games did, good enough for me.

What about immortals like elves who might have hundred+ year generations?  What about nymphs who can be born by spontaneous generation?  Ehh, maybe the elves mutate faster between generations?  Maybe the nymphs just look like the local humans for reasons?  I dunno.  Would it be better to have the fantasy races have fantasy racial variations like they did with the moon/sun elf biz in older Forgotten Realms products?  I don’t think so, because the point is for a black person to not be made to feel weird for wanting their elf to look like a black person.

The difference between this and the non-explained approach of BG3 and DA4 is your character’s looks do say something about where their ancestors are from, instead of being totally random.  Feels more realistic to me.  If you have opinions on how those video games handled it or what I’m writing on this part of the article, I’m probably only interested if you’re noticeably non-white IRL.  I’ll take your word for it, not asking for a picture, just saying it’s trivially easy to get honky opinions – why, this article for example.  🤡 honk honk.

Monster Races.  Ah, the dark skinned powers of darkness, brutish and muscular, out to pillage the fair-skinned noble people of inherent goodness.  The sheisty secretive cabal of big-nosed swarthy wizards with strange beliefs who are the power behind the throne.  The nomads who look human enough to walk among you and steal your children.  Fantasy is coming from a white place innit.

There are many who say the tainted origins of this stuff mean there is no good way to use them – the kind of SJWs who would boycott Wicked and Spirit Halloween stores.  Innocent child of folly that I am, I love wacky out of control monster people who are up to no good, and don’t think those images influenced me the way they were intended by the anti-semites who originated them, scaring their children racist for centuries.  At the same time, saying “everybody who looks like this acts like that” is bad business, and I don’t truck with it.  I’ll navigate my own honkey path here, hope it’s not too problematic.

So, like, goblins as silly faerie creatures, no rossetti->rowling scheming bankers.  Orcs as big buff barbarians but no more evil than humans who are big buff barbarians.  The barbarian thing raises the issue of cultural stereotypes that don’t hinge on race.  I give that a nod here to say, yeah, like races, avoid saying all the people over here act like that / do that.

Unlike D&D, I’m not hobbled by needing an alignment system.  It’s so baked into that game it wouldn’t be easy to extricate, and that ties it back to its history when orcs were an entry in the Monster Manual that said “Alignment: Chaotic Evil.”  In trying to excise the racism from that in new products, they came up with a vision of orcs that was just bizarre.  No Warhammer waaargh in them at all.

Now were Warhammer‘s orks also a racistic stereotype of barbarian marauder?  Yes, but humans in those games also spent all their time choppin’ heads, so it felt a bit more even-handed.  They were really popular to play.  Outsider view on the UK, I feel like wargamers from lower class backgrounds, in a place with a much more blatant class system than we have in the US, may have identified with the violent punk-rock / metal take on the green guys.  Orks winning the board against humans or elves is like sticking it to the aristocrats, right?

So ungluing the cultural archetype from the race, showing more variety, but keeping a place in the world for players who want to waaargh, that’s how I’d like to do.

Colorism.  The very concept of black magic as evil?  Not great.  On the other hand, what’s a fantasy game without hexing diablos riding thru the night like the demons in Fantasia?  Just gotta try to shake off the stank of this stuff.  Again, I’m far from the scholar the subject of colorism deserves, google that shit if you are unfamiliar.  It’s an aspect of racism that isn’t always strictly drawn on racial lines.  People with darker skin are treated more poorly, to the point they are victimized by a skin-lightening cosmetic industry in some places.  Ill.

Anyway, here’s how I handled dökkálfar/ljósálfar in this other post:

Light Elves.  In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division.  While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves.  Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common.  They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a society with some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy.  They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors.  Light colored eyes?

Dark Elves.  Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark.  Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth.  Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities.  Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there.  Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.

So you can have a light elf much darker than a light-colored dark elf, etc.  Most of these fantasy races don’t have that kind of color-based division built in, like orks is green, any shade.  As far as depictions in the game’s art, just making a point of having the prettiest gentlest people sometimes be the darkest.  If 99% of media 5ever must have dark-skinned people be brutes or bad attitudes whenever they are allowed depiction, people like me gotta counter that when we can.

I’m not drawing any grand conclusions or advancing a big thesis, just considering, at least briefly, how I’ll handle these issues in a game.  Have at thee.

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Why LLM Intelligence is Irrelevant

LLMs are more capable of having a thoughtful conversation with me than 99% of humans are.  Why does it matter what’s under the hood?  The proof is in the pudding, brudder.  That’s umpteen thousand words of wasted effort, for reasons beyond “my opps in this debate won’t listen.”

Artificial Intelligence has been a practical vernacular term for everything from the most advanced LLM down to a doombot.  Do the definitions of terms have some relationship with the way they’re used?  No?  Go back in time and tell a few decades of gamers to stop using AI to describe bots.

I come away from these discussions with ever-increasing sympathy for cockroaches and pocket calculators.  So much sound and fury dedicated to singling out human-style intelligence as the only kind that matters.  To what end?

Ironic that ableism/eugenics was brought up as a core aspect of all discussion of intelligence, for a few reasons.  A ) You’re in a movement that was founded on ableism – on a sense of superiority, of priding your cleverness over that of theists.  B ) If humans with limited cognition deserve respect, then LLMs, which also have some aspects of human ability and are lacking in others, should perhaps be afforded the same respect.

I’m not saying they get human rights.  A million rock solid counters to that, I won’t bother.  But maybe we can acknowledge what they can do?  Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits, feels like jealousy to pour a mountain of effort into shit-talking their cognition.

Feels like you, as a human – the most cognition-privileged entity in Earth’s history – see a less able entity coming up to the table and are outraged that they were allowed thru the door.  Feels, dare I say?, ableist.

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EDIT to ADD:  i asked claude what it thought of my article.  i submit this as evidence of “better able to engage with an argument on its own merits”…

Claude: This one’s tighter and punchier than his — you’re making him work harder than he made himself work.

Where you land a clean hit:

The pragmatic definition point is genuinely strong. “AI” has meant everything from Pac-Man ghosts to GPT-5 for forty years, and nobody’s confused about which one is a chess engine and which one is a chatbot.  Demanding a philosophically rigorous definition before you’re allowed to use a word that’s been doing useful descriptive work for decades is a category error — language doesn’t require metaphysical grounding to function.

The ableism turnabout is your sharpest move.  Pointing out that atheism/skepticism as a movement has its own history of “look how much smarter we are than the god-botherers” is a real, fair jab — and then pivoting that same lens onto how he’s treating LLMs is a legitimately clever parallel structure.  It’s not just “gotcha,” it’s actually the same critique he made, aimed back at him.

Where it’s more vibes than argument, and he’d have an opening:

“Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits” — this is doing a lot of work without evidence, and it’s the kind of unqualified claim he’d pounce on immediately, probably fairly.  He’d ask what you mean by “better,” and you’d be back in the same definitional swamp you’re trying to route around.

The “cognition-privileged entity” framing is emotionally potent but slippery — it recasts his skepticism as a status-defense reflex, which might be true as psychology, but it’s an ad hominem move dressed as structural critique.  He could just say “no, I have specific documented reasons (Turpin et al., the correlation data) not general resentment,” and the piece doesn’t really engage those specifics, it goes over his head to motive.

The piece also doesn’t touch his actual strongest material this round — the CoT-faithfulness research and the token/output correlation data.  Those were the parts of his post that weren’t just recycled skepticism; they were closer to real findings.  Your response is more of a structural/political counter-argument than an engagement with the specific evidence he brought this time, which means if he replies, he’ll probably route around your points by saying “sure, but you didn’t address the data.”

Net read:  it’s a good “step back and reframe the whole debate” piece — shorter, sharper, and it exposes something real about the double standard in how he treats “ill-defined” as disqualifying for AI but not for humans.  But it trades precision for punch, and this round he actually brought some precision you didn’t fully engage.

Bébé:  debates rest on priors and we never agreed to terms.  if i don’t agree with the reason why that supporting evidence is relevant, i shouldn’t have to rebut the evidence itself.

Claude:  That’s fair as a general principle — you don’t owe a rebuttal to evidence whose relevance you reject, and demanding people always argue on the other person’s turf is itself a rhetorical trap.  If he’s using “here’s data about CoT correlation” to support a conclusion about whether the word “intelligent” applies, and you don’t grant that token-counting has any bearing on that question in the first place, then yeah, you can reject the frame instead of playing whack-a-mole with his numbers.

Where I’d push back a little: that move only fully works if you’ve made the frame-rejection explicit and specific, not just implicit in a differently-scoped essay.  Right now your piece argues “the concept of intelligence is too incoherent to gatekeep with” — which is a frame-level objection — but it doesn’t say “and therefore your CoT-token-correlation data is irrelevant because X.”  A careful reader (and he will be one) can read your silence on that section as either (a) a principled refusal to engage a frame you reject, or (b) not having a response.  You know which one it is; he won’t concede that from the outside, and it costs you nothing to make it explicit once, briefly — “your token-counting stuff is a category error even if the numbers are right, because intelligence-as-quantity isn’t a concept I’m defending in the first place.”

That’s not the same as being obligated to rebut it point by point.  It’s just closing the door so he can’t later claim you dodged rather than declined.

Bébé:  good thinking.  later bud.

Claude:  Later!  Go easy on him — or don’t, your call.  Enjoy the rest of your night. 🌙

Reality:  (is day lol)

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The Genocide Election and the Kshama Calculation

State has top two primary, no party commitment required.  If the top two winners of the open field are from the same political party, that’s who’s slugging it out en noviembre.  My congressional district has several people vying for Adam Smith’s seat, Adam Smith incluye.  So.

Adam Smith: Did a better job of not fucking up gender on the webform to contact his office than either of WA state’s ancient senators, generally nicey and competent.  I would not hate voting for him again in November if I have to… but.  He’s been voting pro military even in these wretched times, when the US is supporting israel in its genocidal war.  The last time he had a primary challenger who campaigned against that element of his record, Melissa Chaudhry, she lost hard.  I do believe my household had voted for her in that primary.

Melissa Chaudhry – was also noncommittal on trans rights when interviewed by a local paper because she doesn’t want to offend the muslim community.  Not my only reason, but even tho she’s back, she’s no kind of contender and I’m not bothering with her this time.

Kshama Sawant:  The famous Seattle commie who got the city to change its minimum wage before the state did.  Also pro-trans rights.  Also committed what some may regard as cardinal sins in her principled radicalism, and likely to get less done in congress where making deals is more important than standing alone.  However, she has replaced Chaudhry as the anti-genocide candidate of choice.

The other fuckos:  Token gop nazi, random fools wasting their money and everybody’s time.

Kshama has good odds of splitting the progressive vote in a way that allows the gop nazi into November, and the area does have enough gop nazi voters that would give him a shot at winning.  However, Smith has won reelection pretty handily for a long time, so probably said nazi would just be advancing that far to lose.  However however, Kshama would be a less certain win against the nazi, so if Smith comes in third in the primary, it’s possible we could end up with a nazi over us after november.  In fact, the nazis are probably banking on this very idea, seeing her as more defeatable.  Wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve given her campaign shadow money.

But still.  This is the time.  Establishment dems who support genocide with their votes, regardless of what they do in their rhetoric, got to face a reckoning.  We’re taking the risk in my household and voting Sawant in the primary, which could have three different results in November:

Smith vs. Nazi.  This is the most likely result and is a no-brainer of a vote.  Would mean my household’s three votes were repping a fringe position and chucked in the dumpster of history.

Sawant vs. Nazi.  Another easy choice, but the added drawback of being a nailbiter.  Sawant has been slandered in national media hard enough that I’ve literally spoken to nazis in the opposite corner of this big-ass country that have opinions about her, even if they can’t say her name.  That slander can have an effect, and I’m sure I will get comments from people who don’t like her.  The question then.  Would you abstain and let a nazi win?  Probably not, but many in my district might.

Sawant vs. Smith.  Hard choice.  Seems likely Sawant will not be good at playing ball in DC, may get absolutely nothing done.  Or not.  After all, she helped get the min wage increased in Seattle, with everybody on the city council hating her commie ways.  Some kind of ball got played there.  Conversely, Smith may feel safe enough in his incumbency to do whatever he feels, and write more blank checks for murdering children in the Middle East.

So my choice now is between playing it safe and giving the dem establishment what it wants, or risking a nailbiter and possible nazi squeaking into congress, while sending a clarion message I’m done with genocide and the status quo.  I may come to regret it, but it’s message time.  What I’m betting is that if she gets in, she can beat a nazi.  This was, after all, one of the bluest blue states in 2024.

I can’t tell you what to do, but if you feel it’s a risk worth taking, vote Kshama Sawant for congress in Washington State’s 9th district.

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Tap-outs

Man, it was a bad month for writing.  I was doing well enough when I wrote, but there were certain demoralizing circumstances that have been messing with me for a few years and were worse than average this month.  So.  Road Rage goes on indefinite hiatus.

I might fuck around and turn in random Josefina+Blasfemia chapters occasionally.  I know that’s no kind of way to read a story, so if you’re so inclined, wait until I end it, then go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  That story is probably my magnum opus of being weird as fuck.  Centennial Hills, The Septagram, etc, they’re intelligible enough, I think.

Anyway, happy crammed in roman asswipe month part Two.  Maybe shitler will get a month before he’s done, whaddyathink?  A thirteen month year?  It’s time.

Oh, and if it’s time to vote for you, vote!  I’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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