“All observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.”

Extremely relevant XKCD.

An ancient 4chan demotivator summarized FFTA as “your life sucks shit and I’m dragging you back to it.” You’d think it was fundamentally impossible to have a good story where the message is, escapism is bad, mmkay? But it would be so easy to say Ivalice only exists as a shared hallucination, with the locals they’ve befriended gradually revealed as shallow imitations of people. Or: say it’s a real place which these kids can visit any time… y’know… like players do. Put some ludonarrative assonance on the idea there’s a crapsack reality you do need to take care of, to continue enjoying this fantasy.

On the other hand, as an actual game, Penny Arcade gave it the “Oh shit, is it 3AM?” award.

An isekai where the MC is Snuffkin.

Calling Farscape an isekai took me out.

And I mean… you’re not wrong.

“If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

Some guy in a 1995 Hilux feels it touch the asphalt like he’s a fucking Nazgul, and is pulling the metal out of it before you’ve shut your front door.

That filename, though.

Would the cyclops explain Laertes being played by an actor who is Maori?

This bigot is stupid because Africa is right fucking there. But audiences at large might ask ‘what the fuck?’ if anyone in ancient proto-Greece was plainly Native American. And that mass response almost cannot be wrong. Anything that takes everyone out of the story is a failure of storytelling. Working around that is not difficult: do it early. That’s how you make people go ‘holy shit, a cyclops!’ instead of ‘why the fuck does this movie have a cyclops?’

Suspension of disbelief is not something the audience owes. It’s a trust that the story will follow its own rules. Every story has rules, and the ones it does not provide are filled in with ones you already know. That includes rules from other stories: nobody in Harry Potter bothers explaining that brooms can fly. But that made-up element is not carte blanche for someone to wield a lightsaber. The rules you know for fantasy would excuse a surprise dragon, but not a surprise spaceship. Nor could an eleven-year-old boy from jolly old England whip out a handgun, without breaking immersion, even though handguns are real. A story where that kind of character can have that kind of object takes an entirely different shape.

It is important to avoid bad arguments even when dunking on the dumbest motherfuckers alive. We don’t need to undermine the concept of criticizing fiction, just to tell a crybully racist to fuck off.

Well, that was nice while it lasted.

Hell, I’m relieved when someone beat me to it. Means I can check it off my to-do list.

‘I bet you could combine Wine and QEMU’ was on there for a while, and oh thank god, FEX is serious business now.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art

Ah, someone’s never seen 8088 Corruption. The encoder was a brute-force comparison of source pixels with downscaled / blended characters in CGA’s few available colors.

… wait, AAlib definitely uses shape. Is the author just new to ASCII art?

Killer effort, regardless.

Stolen valor tweet.

Cats understand where they’re not wanted and seek it out.

Christ, could you miss the point any harder?

“It must have come from upriver!”

Congratulations on the worst take in a competitive field.

Just… what the fuck? What is it about this distinction that makes people lose all sense? ‘Hey bearing in mind we’re still talking about criminal creeping on children, it’s important to remember that actual touching is worse than doodling over images, so let’s not dilute a term specifically f–’ ‘There is no difference between fiction and reality because what if a crazy person couldn’t tell fiction from reality?!’

Get help.

Ah, the squeedlyspooch.

Because of the sentence you just quoted.

I’m making an explicit argument about the purpose of the term, as a necessary component of dealing with some of the worst crimes imaginable. I didn’t figure I’d ever have to explain to someone why abusing a human child is fundamentally different from and worse than drawing on top of a fuckin’ JPEG.

If y’all manage to stomp the meaning out of “CSAM,” the same way y’did for “CP,” we’re gonna be right back here, where there’s some bespoke term for the visual evidence of actual assault that physically occurred, yet people insist that a fictional rendering is-too VEOAATPO.

Diluting the impact of these terms is antithetical to protecting children. That stupid Horses game had people lobbing the term “CSAM” at it… for a game you can buy on GOG. If you can casually say “I bought some CSAM at Walmart the other day,” then the term’s not doing its fucking job, describing the kind of imagery you go straight to jail for.