My book concept purposely violates most plot structures in favor of character, which I think is a good thing. Readers spend more than half the time figuring out who to even cheer for, which I think is realistic. I’ve got other tropes, like a mad scientists and some villain with a scar on their face, but those are pretty intentional. The whole well-trodden act or plot structure is purposely different.
I think Arcane season 2 is going to impact me like Game of Thrones.
Masterpiece earlier seasons and then messy later seasons. Except instead of 8 seasons, it’s all gonna slam hard in just two seasons.
One cannot undo the depth and enjoyment of watching the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones based on the later seasons’ quality issues. The later seasons diminish the quality for the franchises as a whole but the earlier seasons remain masterpieces.
Imo, regardless of how Arcane Season 2 plays out, the first season is a mostly self-contained masterpiece. The quality of the second season greatly impacts the franchise but can’t undo the quality of season 1, which had a three-year real world time pause between seasons. Amazing first season for years. So now I look to see if it’s maintained or impaired.
The crazy thing is that this is actually kind of a common dream variant. I've seen others describe it too. It's something that can come up in our common pysche.
I have it to, for like two different classes. It's not that vivid, but literally 15 years after graduating college I still occasionally have a "fuck, did I not realize I had an <xyz> class this whole semester?" dream.
I unironically get a higher reply-to-follower ratio if I ask questions on Nostr vs Twitter.
But that's from a baseline of having 10x more followers on Twitter, so of course the absolute number of replies is still way higher there.
I had a rare case where I actually liked my public schooling. But when I look around today I don't really see the same type of schooling anymore. All of this drama that exists today was not really a thing in my district two decades ago.
Things which you actively dislike and disparage, are not things you don’t care about.
They’re things you care about but that don’t go the way you expected.
The first season of Arcane was a masterclass on how to write interesting villains. The heroes are fine, but the villains Silco and Jinx are very well done, and went through more full character arcs than the heroes, which was an interesting creative choice.
It’s instructive for writing decent fiction, so I’ll put my longform blog-like thoughts here on what they did right compared to most fiction I’ve seen recently, which could be useful to someone whether or not they’ve seen the show. It’ll have major spoilers though.
Silco Villain Analysis:
https://m.primal.net/KwDV.jpg
Silco is first shown as a tropey crime lord. He’s cruel, power-hungry, and has a damaged eye and a scar. His philosophy is that power is held not by those who are born with it, but by those who will do anything to take it.
But then we see his backstory. Silco grew up in the undercity, in a literal fissure in the ground where the air and water are polluted by the rich city state Pilthover that rules over them and literally sits above them. As he became a leader of the undercity, he fought for its sovereign independence from Pilthover, including to the point of promoting violent uprisings. He was then betrayed by his best friend and co-leader Vander, since Vander decided to make peace with Pilthover so that the warring and violence would stop. Basically, Vander had less of a stomach for the violence after seeing so much of it, whereas Silco remained radical for his goal of independence. And so Vander tried to kill Silco to make peace. And then Silco, while he was being betrayed, cut, and drowned, narrated that he could just die and have his troubles go away, or he could fight with everything he had, and he did the latter and managed to escape death. As Vander ruled the undercity in peace (but still oppressed and polluted by Pilthover), Silco partnered with a scientist that was making a new weapon: a mutant serum called shimmer.
Years later in the show, Silco used the power of shimmer to overthrew Vander and become the boss of the undercity. Unlike many cliché villains, Silco respects Vander, had gotten over his hatred for Vander for betraying him, and is even thankful for Vander’s betrayal since he views the life or death moment as having helped him find the strength that he was previously lacking, but he wants to go on his more dangerous path of gaining independence for the undercity, which means replacing Vander. And that’s where his villainous streak gets bad: he’s willing to kill Vander, and even Vander’s adopted children to eliminate witnesses when they try to rescue Vander. The youngest child, however, embraces him, and so instead he adopts her as his daughter and truly cares for her, but by doing so corrupts her to be more like him as she becomes an adult.
Throughout the show after that, he makes plans, sometimes has to adjust those plans based on new things happening, reads other peoples’ emotions very well and communicates to them effectively to move forward with his goals, etc. He uses intimidation, science, and economics where possible, and violence more rarely as needed. There are no bad plot arcs based on obvious miscommunications and so forth. He’s a dynamic, competent, and realistic character that is impacting and reacting to the plot. He focuses on the development of shimmer to grow his undercity’s power so that if or when war for independence breaks out, his side will have a chance against Pilthover.
But then, toward the end… as the situation gets messier, he chooses a path of peace with Pilthover while getting what he wants. His years of production of shimmer along with his adopted daughter’s theft of Pilthover’s key technology enhanced the underworld’s power enough that the council leadership of Pilthover agreed to let the undercity have its independence. Silco proposes to cease the production of shimmer and give back Pilthover’s stolen tech, thereby depowering himself in exchange for everything he has ever wanted: sovereign independence for his undercity which will be called Zaun, along with trade and economic deals between Zaun and Pilthover. And now he understands the late Vander better. Politics over violence.
But then Pilthover gives Silco a curveball- he has to give up his adopted daughter to be arrested for her crimes as part of the peace deal, which he contemplates doing and is leaning toward doing, but is torn up about it. He ends up being killed by his adopted daughter, and loving her anyway as he dies, siding with her at the end.
A tragic ending for him, but he’s at peace with it. Similar to how he views Vander’s betrayal of him all those years ago as having helped him find his own strength, power, and agency, Silco views that he has now passed on those traits to his adopted daughter.
Jinx Villain Analysis:
https://m.primal.net/KwDX.jpg
In League of Legends, Jinx is basically a Harley Quinn knock-off. Little depth. That’s what the show had to work with, and they filled it in so that she’s a better character than recent depictions of Harley. There are so many ways to mess this trope up and they avoided most of them.
Jinx starts off as an impoverished kid thief from the undercity; a physically weak tinkerer trying to make little smoke bombs and stuff to help her older sister and her two adopted brothers. Her parents were killed by Pilthover’s soldiers/police in a failed uprising, and so she is raised by Vander, who doesn’t have much in common with her and instead focuses on raising Jinx’s older sister who he has a lot in common with. And so Jinx ultimately is raised mainly by her older sister, which is who she has her primary emotional bond with. Her adopted brothers view her as weak, and it’s always her sister that sticks up for her.
In an attempt to help her sister and adopted brothers save Vander from Silco’s overthrow of Vander and prove she is not weak, Jinx accidentally messes everything up. One of her creations, a bomb, accidentally kills her adopted brothers directly and ultimately leads to Vander’s death indirectly. And then from her perspective, she is abandoned by her older sister due to her disastrous bomb decision, and so instead Jinx embraces Silco and joins him. Silco replaces Jinx’s sister as the one directly raising Jinx, and for whom Jinx has her main emotional bond with as her father figure.
When she grows up, Jinx becomes a mentally unwell weapon maker and combatant, supporting Silco’s undercity’s accumulation of power against both Pilthover and rival gangs.
Harley Quinn’s “craziness” as depicted in Suicide Squad movies and so forth, is pretty shallow. It’s played most of the time for humor and aesthetics, and if one were to describe in what specific ways she is crazy, it would be hard for many to do so. It does have a name though: it's called histrionic personality disorder, and in her case it's combined with what is basically sociopathy I guess.
Jinx’s mentally ill aspects are more specific. And she suffers for it; it’s not depicted as funny. The two adopted brothers she accidentally killed are now voices in her head and visions in her eyes. She is emotionally stunted, stuck with the personality of a child despite possessing the intelligence of an adult engineer and schemer. She is emotionally over-dependent, first on her older sister and then on Silco as her adopted father. She is obsessive-compulsive, which makes her a good engineer and schemer but also stresses her mentally. She is self-absorbed. She lacks empathy for others except those she latches onto. As her sister returns after seven years, Jinx is forced to confront the violent person she has become, and has an identity crisis over it. She wonders if she could go back to being a more normal person after all that she’s done, accepted by society, or if should she remain in her more violent line of work of empowering Silco and the undercity.
Despite her mental issues, she’s among the most proactive and competent characters in the season and all of her actions combine into a specific purpose rather than being random. She builds a variety of dangerous weapons and traps. She uses them to kill rival gang members that try to attack Silco’s shimmer operations. In a world where Pilthover’s soldiers/police killed her parents and most of them are corrupt, Jinx kills soldiers with bombs in order to sneak into Pilthover’s academy to steal a sample of their most powerful technology, successfully reverse-engineers it, and makes it into a powerful new weapon to potentially use against them. When her sister returns after seven years and Silco is hiding that fact from her, Jinx correctly senses something is being hidden due to Silco’s gang acting differently, captures and interrogates Silco’s underboss in order to find out that her sister is back, leaves that underboss unharmed, and then actively reaches out to her sister to try to reconnect with her. She is angry at Silco for lying to her but goes to him to learn why he did, and is convinced to remain on his side. When Pilthover’s technology is stolen back from her, she goes after it, kills more corrupt soldiers to do so, fights one of her childhood friends who leads a rival gang now, and successfully retrieves it before it gets back to Pilthover, nearly dying in the process and then going through an agonizing recovery.
So she’s not quite sociopathic up to that point- she mercilessly kills those who she sees as enemy combatants rather than civilians, and for specific goals. She has outright schizophrenia and a growing identity crisis, but mostly functions around it. It's not the "tragic backstory therefore I kill everyone" weak trope.
But then that’s where her mental illness starts to go off the rails and screw everything up for everyone. Her sister gets a girlfriend who is a Pilthover soldier (who wants to get Pilthover’s stolen technology back from Jinx), and Jinx views that girlfriend, of the enemy side, as having replaced Jinx as her sister’s closest emotional bond, and Jinx visibly sees schizophrenic delusions of that girlfriend laughing at her. She is given shimmer serum by Silco to save her life from injuries at one point, which makes her stronger but likely deteriorates her mental state further. And then, as Silco agrees to peace with Pilthover, Pilthover’s leaders demand that Jinx be given to them and imprisoned as part of the deal, putting Silco in a tough position to choose between the undercity’s peaceful independence or his adopted daughter’s freedom. So Jinx feels betrayed by both her sister and by Silco. She successfully captures Silco, her sister, and her sister’s girlfriend, to talk to them and figure out what her decisions will be. Mainly at that point she wants her sister to side back with her.
In the end, she kills Silco to prevent him from killing her sister, and spares the life of her sister’s girlfriend when she could have killed her. As Silco dies (which Jinx is heartbroken over), he tells Jinx he would never have gone through with giving her over to Pilthover, would give up everything else for her, and tells her to be herself.
She then resolves her identity crisis, and decides to fully embrace herself as a war criminal against Pilthover, remembering what Silco told her years ago: “we will show them all”. She could turn herself in to Pilthover for life imprisonment in terrible conditions in exchange for her undercity’s peaceful independence, but she chooses not to make that type of sacrifice. Instead, she chooses to “show them all”, and launches that new weapon, which she made from the tech she stole from Pilthover, straight at Pilthover’s council chamber, killing most or all of Pilthover’s seven corrupt council leaders and triggering outright war for the undercity's independence.
And that’s an actual set of character arcs for villains. One can see from their perspective why they're the protagonist of their own stories.
And a chain of cause-and-effect actions went from the economic and cultural situation of Pilthover and its undercity, to Silco, and then to Jinx, and then disastrously back to Pilthover’s leaders, with certain decision points along the way to either continue the cycle or break it with a more selfless decision.
Here's an anecdotal data point on Nostr.
Yesterday I asked people on both Nostr and Twitter what tropes in fiction they don't like. I have about 10x the followers on Twitter than Nostr, but I only received like 6x the number of replies on Twitter.
So Nostr had a higher relative engagement rate.
For the most part no, with the exception that like the 10% worst people on Twitter are worse than the 10% worst people on Nostr, so there’s a more noticeable left tail of bad replies, even though the replies are otherwise similar.
I try not to judge Nostr clients too hard in any given month on this early basis. They're all working on novel tech to increase speed and usability. They generally raised little capital or in some cases no capital, compared to what so-called Nostr competitors raised in the crypto space. How many bitcoin companies are around from a decade ago?
I use a given app, and rotate to what is gathering momentum to see if it works better, while still using what I used before, to test things as they come and go, because rarely does one client just go away. Multiple clients develop out of that trough and keep competing. But as one app goes through a period of weakness, I don't write it off. I ask what's happening and how it could be better, or what apps should look like.
I'm happy to see so many clients pushing hard and competing. That competition is what makes Nostr more interesting than Twitter/X over time. And indeed if none of the current clients provide what you want, you can enter with your own code and/or capital.
It's open. That's what makes it beautiful. That's why we're here.
I've got weak taste so I mostly don't notice the difference between 8/10 sushi and 10/10 sushi.
We have basically a 8/10 hole-in-the-wall sushi place near us, and the owner and a senior waiter know my husband and I, and so as soon as we walk in, they just bring us to our seat (they know our preferred seats) and start getting us our normal order and ask if we want any modifications to our normal order.
And then I go to NYC or London or Hong Kong top sushi restaurants for 3x the price when I'm there, and to me it's only like 1.1x as good as my local hole-in-the-wall place. The difference I notice is consistency. The tuna in my local place varies a little bit whereas the tuna at the expensive places is more consistent, but the top-ends of both are similar to me. As a result my default favorite place is honestly just my local spot so far since they're my dudes. Haven't been to Japan yet though.
Cairo is not a great sushi place, so when I live there for part of each year even at fancy places I'd put it at 6/10 or 7/10. I notice their weakness vs my preferred American local spot. Egypt is amazing at grilled fish, though. Haven't found better grilled fish outside of Alexandria and Cairo.
Steaks hit me harder in the top end than sushi for some reason. I'm more picky between 10/10 steak and 8/10 steak than 10/10 tuna and 8/10 tuna.
I've been loosely outlining writing fiction for a decade or two. I like it, I analyze it deeply, and I feel the urge to create it. But I'm busy elsewhere.
I think pendulums swing around a bit. There was a time where I wanted to read a lot of religious/spiritual stuff. All top-10 religious/spiritual texts to better understand humanity. And then, after a lot of that I got my fill, there was a time where I became bored and pursued more worldly things, fully locked in for a decade or more. And after many years of that I have my fill, and part of me wants to prioritize stories I have thought about for years now. To see if I can transmit themes to others through fiction.
People who compete with me in financial analysis don't inspire me. People who write amazing stories do inspire me.
Thanks.
One of the characters I'm working on in my hobby writing has this background, but I've been trying to explore it in fresh ways. He falls into the conflict of conscience category.
Since there's nothing new under the sun, fiction in general always has some tropes, but good fiction does a given trope better than average or subverts it somewhat, or combines tropes into a fairly new combination in an interesting way.
Good evening.
In the first year after my husband and I bought our house, we kept having the security system’s smoke alarm go off, and it would auto-alert the fire department. A mess, repeatedly.
Literally the same dude would show up, sigh, and be like “you cool?” And I’d be like, “yeah, sorry.”
Eventually I was like… let’s just remove that one. It’s always the problem, it’s too close to the stove. The so-called experts installed it, but from experience it was wrong. So we outed it. Just that one.
And we did, and the problem went away forever. For us and for the firemen.
Sometimes it’s the rules that are the problem. Not the rules’ breaker. Test everything.
What made Arcane good ultimately was that so many characters in the conflict made good decisions and tried to do smart things.
A lot of lazy writing relies on people making irrational decisions or having lots of miscommunications. This show highlighted the difficulty of the context rather than individual dumb decisions or miscommunication or one-note characters: it was about the economic and ethical backdrop of the situation, and how characters responded to it.
The visuals, music, voice acting, and all of that was great, but it was the writing that tied it together. Some of the most interesting heroes and villains.
And it's shockingly a video game adaption, which is why I didn't bother to see it until three years after it came out, now that season 2 is about to come out.
Just finished Arcane season 1. Only nine episodes. That was some damn fine television.
Episode 3 was my favorite overall. And the last scene of the season 9 was pretty epic.
I'm definitely going to watch season 2 when it comes out, although I suspect it'll be weaker than the first one now that everyone has their video game powers.
Tech generally moves in one direction. Musical artists feared streaming and piracy but then the economics shifted more toward concerts. I think visual art will be similar- people do want original one-of-one works.
The Pentagon is super well designed structurally. Being flat and wide makes it safer. That’s why a plane hitting it didn’t cause nearly as much damage as the World Trade Center; it would basically require a nuke to destroy the whole building. And it had the five sided shape because it was originally going to be between five roads, but then Roosevelt had the location changed.
Gm.
I spent my evenings writing 30,000 words of science fiction over the past week.
Definitely fun, and the most fiction I’ve ever written. Prior to this I would write like a sample chapter, whereas this was like 8 chapters.
I wrote the first draft of Broken Money in about 6 months while running other aspects of my business, and that was 160,000 words or so. Things can come out really fast when you already thought a lot about what you say.
So in Broken Money's case, five years of research went into it, but it then spilled out into a solid first draft in six months, followed by a lot of editing.
In this fiction case, I had this portion of a story pretty mapped out in my head, so the words just flew out. It won't be like that consistently.
Today I learned that the new Surat Diamond Bourse in India is the biggest office building in the world in terms of square meters of floor space.
Until this was built in 2023, the Pentagon was the world’s biggest office building. More floor space than any skyscraper. Now this one is bigger.
But my first thought is, “why the hell does a diamond exchange have to be so big!?” Like, I can’t imagine what they need so much space for.
https://m.primal.net/KqKZ.jpg
There are so many indie-published novels with mediocre ratings on Goodreads and Amazon and such, and I always find myself thinking, “who reads these?”
Since I don’t have as much time as I’d like to read fiction, I generally end up reading just the big hits and then continue reading sequels on them.
I don’t think indie published books are more likely to be mediocre. Instead, it’s just that there are *a lot* of them, and books in general. And so when there is a flood of like 3.6 out of 5 rated books, I just wonder who the audience is that goes and reads them.
The Tao Te Ching has interesting commentary on ritual, and thus in context can refer to organized religion.
It places the Tao at the top (basically the source of everything), and then has a hierarchy of goodness, kindness, justice, and then ritual. Ritual is basically what's left after its drained of its depth, and people go through motions that are now quite distanced from the original purpose or context.
https://m.primal.net/KpnH.png
The Harry Potter series was an example where, whenever fans voted for their favorite character, it usually wasn't Harry Potter. He'd be in the runningb but not at the top.
Fans were like, "I mean, we all like Harry. But we don't necessarily *love* him. And he's not *fucking memorable*. He's kind of boring.
Many people instead preferred Snape, Hermione, Black, Dumbledore, Dobby, etc.
-The very deep anti-hero or pseudo-villain. Highly conflicted, dark, and emotional, but sides with good. (Snape)
-The smartest one that fixes everything. (The books were read by bookish types, and Hermione was their bookish character identifier.)
-The wise mentor. Usually among the strongest, but from the prior generation. The plot has to factor him/her out. (Dumbledore)
-The chad scary seeming-villain who is actually a hero. (Sirius)
-The ultra-weak character, with charisma and talents, that manipulates things around the margins and morally *has* to fucking win. (Dobby).
When it comes to all fiction you consume (books, shows, movies), do you tend to remember the villain or the hero more, many years later?
Here are some variables to consider:
-Characters and concepts that stuck with you personally, for years.
-Memorable quotes or images.
-Iconic characters. Archetypes. Things you want to replicate.
-Roles that were so fucking well-acted that it can't be topped, and thus brought out the full complexity of the character.
Clarifications prior to answering:
-Villains include very bad folks that turn good at the end (e.g. Darth Vader). Partial goodness is often part of good villain design.
-Heroes include clear anti-heroes from the first act of the story (e.g. Han Solo). Partial badness is often part of good hero design.
I'm DMing a custom Dragonlance campaign for my husband's party, based after the fifth edition published Dragonlance campaign which he completed as a sequel, and then me basing the story from there, partially from the books.
And indeed Raistlin's a key variable in my custom second-half story. Super interesting. Similar with Kitiara.
What details of Raistlin made him your all-time favorite hero rather than just like, a top-10? I love those types of nuances.
In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy.
As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it.
But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship.
Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/world/asia/china-economy-garbage-time.html
Back when ETH did the change to its money supply algorithm to be deflationary, a lot of people correctly pointed out that they can just change it again.
And they did, so now it's back to having a similar supply distribution rate as bitcoin, but with fewer reasons for anyone to want to hold it long term relative to bitcoin, and with more competition nipping at its heels than bitcoin.
https://m.primal.net/KpBk.pnghttps://m.primal.net/KpBf.png
Latin American equities have had a big stretch of underperformance vs US equities, but since December 2021 they haven’t made a lower low on a total return basis.
One of the things I’m watching in macro land is whether there is some meaningful reversal here.
The combo of 1) lots of global capital stuffed into US capital markets and 2) a US rate cutting cycle, is a potential catalyst for serious multi-year capital rotation toward more global assets.
https://m.primal.net/KomD.jpg
Anybody watch the Netflix show Arcane?
I ignored it for years since video game adoptions into other media are rarely good.
But so far this is surprisingly solid.
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