Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.
dashdsrdash
joined 2 years ago
Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can't take care of each other nicely.)
Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you'll need to come up with a new story.
Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!
I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but... oh, too late.
Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.
"Rationalism" is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist's mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don't want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
spoiler
The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas -- the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful -- and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.
When their experimental subjects aren't moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers -- superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a 'scream' or 'song' that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.
Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.
Sure, but then you have to generate all that crap and store it with them. Preumably Github will eventually decide that you are wasting their space and bandwidth and... no, never mind, they're Microsoft now. Competence isn't in their vocabulary.
As long as it isn't where he is, why should he care? He's retiring on Mars, anyway.
(Please, deities, send Musk and Thiel to Mars soon. Together, if possible.)
You must prove yourself in the Outer Circle before being granted leave to study the Inner Mysteries. Or at least attend the right parties.
Tchah! Decker does not go far enough!
It is clear that there must be people better suited to raise children than a dimwit like him! He should arrange for his genetic superiors to breed, then give the babies to the perfect parents, and he should give them the one thing he has of value: money!
(and please have nothing else to do with children ever again, k thx bye)
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"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway.
"As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks."
"Are you rich?" said another.
This made Ford laugh.
He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Do I look rich?" he said.
"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people..."
"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?"
"I tell them it's OK to be rich."
Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.
Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.
"You what?" he said.
The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.
"It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city."