dungeon master: what’s your alignment
guy who’s never played dnd before: is that how nerds ask if you’re gay

is there a term for like, the opposite of a spiritual successor? where a following work has the aesthetic and canonical traits of its predecessor but narratively, tonally, and philosophically differs so wildly from it as to be nearly unrecognizable?

cause i feel like that might be the relationship Aliens has with the original Alien.

Reading more SSC archives, and came across this:

I remember, one of my first few months of internship, listening to a patient – not a PTSD patient or anything, just someone presenting with something totally different like bipolar disorder or drug addiction – explain the brutal abuse he suffered as a child. And the whole time, I was thinking “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry.”

And then he finished his story and I had to say something. And I didn’t want to say “Oh god oh god this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard I want to go home and cry”, because I was supposed to be Competent Medical Professional, and Competent Medical Professionals don’t go home and cry every time they hear a sad story.

[…]

So I said: “Gaaaaaaaaaah!”

This may, in retrospect, not have been the most appropriate comment.

and I realized I had the matching half of this anecdote and needed to share.

When I was fifteen, a 70-year-old guy whom I had never met before decided that we were In Love – despite my and my parents’ protests to the contrary – and started doing various creatively creepy things, like writing me long letters about how Pure and Definitely Nonsexual his Love For Me was, and stalking me online, and asking my parents’ permission to court me.

This was exactly as creepy as it sounds. It was really not improved by the fact that various community members, including all of the relevant authority figures, decided to take positions ranging from “none of our business” to “there are two sides to every story” to “you must have done something.”

(Thankfully, my parents were completely absolutely 100% on my side. I don’t think I could have coped, otherwise.)

Anyhow, eventually we went to the police, and so I got to be sixteen and sitting in the office of a local detective watching her look through the casefile my mom had painstakingly made up on this guy in a desperate attempt to get someone to take this seriously.

And as I was sitting there trying not to cry and wishing my parents hadn’t decided I was old enough to talk to the detective alone, she got to the photocopy of the first creepy love letter the guy had sent me.

And I swear to god the detective flinched back from the paper a little and said “Gaaaaaaaaaaah!”

…and I nearly broke down crying on the spot, because it was such a massive relief to finally have someone acknowledge that this whole thing was absurdly horrifying and creepy, instead of having to wonder if I was just crazy or oversensitive or something.

And then of course she apologized and said something much more professional about the casefile which I have long since forgotten. But over the next couple of years of dealing with that guy, I honestly cannot express how often I thought about that professional competent detective going “gaaaaah!” at his letter, and felt reassured that I was not the crazy one, and that the legal system was going to look at this case and go “gaaah!”

I will take that over all the carefully taught Certified Empathy Responses in the world.

[Epistemic status: 100% talking out of my ass. I just got done with exams, okay?]

The effect of punishing children for swearing and attempting to keep them from hearing certain words is not to prevent them from learning the meaning of profanity but to teach it. Hiding and punishing certain words marks them as taboo, which is a far more important part of their meaning and usage than the blasphemies or bodily functions which they denote.

Furthermore, keeping in mind the major role that children’s language-learning process plays in the construction and development of a language, it seems at least plausible that this process doesn’t just communicate a taboo but plays a large part in constructing it. That is, the power of profanity derives from its invocation of the experience of being a child for whom certain words are hidden and forbidden. So by hiding it and punishing its usage, the adults create its meaning.

On some level, I think this might be the whole point.

I wish there were a conservative party anywhere that was conservative in the sense of ‘it rarely gets the computer working to smash it and also it rarely gets the country working to smash it, our policies will all be reversible and tested before they are scaled up and we will treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions like the courts and good diplomatic relations with our neighbors’.

On 5 November 1915, in Prague, Dr Franz Kafka, a deeply educated lawyer, a fast-track highflyer in the service of his state, co-owner of an asbestos factory and newly announced winner of Berlin’s biggest literary prize, concluded that the Germanic victory he desired was now certain. He therefore rationally and freely chose to enhance his future wealth by putting about £30,000 in today’s money into a rock-solid vehicle: Austrian 5.5 per cent fifteen-year bonds. It was not a prophetic call: three years later, the Habsburg Empire defaulted on its centuries-old sovereign debt by the simple, if drastic, method of ceasing to exist.