Carl Muckenhoupt @CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social

It's enough to make me wonder if Hamilton was deliberately modeled after JCS. Heck, the whole basis of both shows is "Take something from history and present it in today's popular musical style".

Thinking about the analogy between Hamilton and Jesus Christ Superstar. There's some pretty close parallels, especially in the bad guys: You've got Judas/Burr, the sympathetic one who's befriended by the good guy but who lacks his convictions; Caiaphas/Jefferson, the political manipulator who sees him as a threat and plots his downfall; and Herod/George III, the entrenched power who's played for comedy. Notably, the latter two are in strikingly different musical styles than the rest of the show.

Should, shoulder, shouldest

A gaming phenomenon that I genuinely do not understand:
A game gets released on PC. A person buys and plays it Then it gets a console port, and the same person excitedly awaits the release of the port so they can buy it again and play it on that console.

Sometimes I get jealous of how Borges could just write a plot summary and release it as a short story. I wish I could get away with that in games.

A thing that bothers me: When things assume that you can't solve simple substitution ciphers.

I just played through an episode of an episodic puzzle-story thing that gave me a cipher with a crib of fully fifteen letters -- yes, the majority of the alphabet. "With that much information, surely they expect me to crack the rest by hand!" I thought. Nope. An hour or so after cracking the cipher, I discovered the puzzle that gives you the other eleven letters.

What is it with Joss Whedon and giving blatantly wrong names to artifacts?

Buffy: Finds an ancient magical battleaxe. Everyone calls it a "scythe". It looks nothing like a scythe.

Agents of SHIELD: An alien artifact, a small irregularly-shaped metal object capable of being held in one hand, is called an "obelisk".

If Firefly had run for another season, they'd probably find an ancient powerful umbrella and call it a gazebo or something

Long ago, a chessemaker had a brilliant realization: In the long run, the fight against mold is a losing one. You ultimately can't prevent cheese from getting moldy. But you can choose to cooperate with the molds that taste good.

That cheesemaker would have made a good game designer.

So, is it just a foregone conclusion that the Billy of Tea eventually lost its fight with the whale as the sailors succumbed to scurvy because the Wellerman brought them sugar and tea and rum but not fresh fruit

Sudden realization: In choice-based IF, I don't have to actually convince the player to do a thing. I can take it as a foregone conclusion that they did it and, to provide a sense of agency, ask them *why* they did it. This feels somehow like cheating.

An odd etymological convergence:

"Pitch black" literally means the color of pitch, a tarry substance.

"Pitch perfect" literally means hitting musical pitches with perfect precision.

But "pitch black" means "completely black", and "pitch perfect" (usually used metaphorically) means "absolutely perfect". In both, the literal meaning is lost and "pitch" effectively becomes an intensifier.

I wonder if this usage will spread to other adjectives? Like, "pitch hard" or "pitch serious" or whatever.

Has any benign troublemaker tried putting the text of a short work, like a poem or something, by one of the more litigious authors onto the blockchain without their permission?

(I guess the problem with this idea is that the only people who can get stuff onto the blockchain these days are people who don't *want* it messed with)

For what it's worth, I agree with the majority, for reasons that have already been articulated in the comments, on both platforms. Twitter is a private company; the only organization running Twitter servers is Twitter itself, which makes it a single point of failure.

On the other hand, who knows? We don't really have a lot of data on the longevity of social media sites. Some of the ones widely regarded as "dead" are still around.

The results are in! On both platforms, a majority of those responding believe Mastodon will outlive Twitter. The ratio, however, is very different. On Twitter, 58% believe it. On Mastodon, 90%.

Also, the poll got 19 votes on Twitter and 62 on Mastodon, despite my lower follower count on Mastodon. I suspect this is because everyone on Mastodon has opinions about Twitter and only a minority of people on Twitter have opinions about Mastodon.

Which do you expect to still be around when the other shuts down for good?
(I'm posting this to both Twitter and Mastodon because I'm curious to see any difference in the response.)

Everyone knows that the least convincing proofs for God's existence are the "ontological" arguments of Pascal and Anselm. But for my money, the *second* least convincing proof is the "first cause" argument, which in its simplest form can be stated as "Everything has a cause. Therefore, something does not have a cause."

(I'm not including arguments in favor of belief in God that don't even address existence, such as Pascal's Wager or Life of Pi.)

Me: So, wait, your offspring are going to eat you alive?
Spider: That's right.
Me: Isn't that kind of horrible?
Spider: You'd rather they ate me dead and decayed? Live meat is healthy, good for young spiders.
Me: I mean I'm horrified by the idea of being eaten at all.
Spider: This is the thing you humans don't get, because you don't have the option of a good death. Death is always a failure for you, no matter how it happens. If I die feeding my children, that means I win.

Idea re: videogames with cats. In general, cats in games are either mere decorative elements, passive NPCs, or, in rare cases, PCs. It strikes me that a puzzle game about manipulating a cat's behavior indirectly through its environment would be much more reflective of our actual relationship with cats. We like watching their reactions to the things we do.

There's an old parable about a holy man who employs two disciples to massage his legs, one for the left leg, one for the right. However, the disciples' eagerness to please turns to jealousy and violence. When the master crosses his left leg over his right, the right-leg servant takes this as an attack and hurts the man's left leg. When the left-leg servant sees this, he hurts the man's right leg in revenge.

This is basically what using Unity's UI libraries is like.

Evil must never be allowed to succeed, not just because of the immediate consequences of evil, but because other people will look at it and think its evil was the cause of its success, and use that to justify further evil as sensible and even necessary.