Overly complicated world-building requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity. No one wants that. They want characters and drama and entertainment. If you want world-building over a good story, read an RPG manual.
The obvious advise of "show; don't tell" still applies. If you have a complicated world and try to show that off to the reader/viewer/player with lots of exposition most people will hate that. But many beloved works of fiction manage to have complex worlds that you naturally experience through the story.
On the other hand, if the author doesn't do world-building, that often leads to illogical situations and issues with internal consistency. For example if you have people living on floating islands they obviously will prefer bows over swords; or sniper rifles over pistols. If they don't, there better be a good reason (that makes sense in the world).
Yeah exactly. I wrote a rough draft of a several centuries post collapse great lakes area, after a writing prompt on Reddit. It was something like "tribal people find mount Rushmore", and I ran with it mentally for a few months. I adored removing as much "tell" as I could without making things incomprehensible.
Ann Arbor became Anaba, Michigan became Meshaga. Russymons are Rust Demons, automated hunter killer drones that sometimes come to life if disturbed.
Sorry, offtopic rambling. Cool to remember how much work I put in!
the article is critiquing Tolkien's world-building as too simple. I'm struggling to see how his vision of complexity would in any way not require exposition dumps constantly so as not to gloss over something and be too "simple" for him.
> Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.
The lack of detail and explanation here does work that no amount of exposition could do.
Mountains of expository prose are a crutch for an unskilled author. There are a number of storytelling techniques to build out a world as it becomes relevant that allow for hinting at greater depths. These allow for exposition, characterization, and drama while still hinting at greater depths without dedicating entire chapters to the socio-economics of grain production.
I think you need enough expository over time to build a good world. Just that it can be done badly or in a good way. Discworld is good example in my mind of mostly consistent world build by enough exposition done in various ways...
>requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity
Only if the world-building is done for a book or a movie.
Exploration-based videogames, RPG settings and fictional world Wikis are just as valid use cases. I suspect such formats are going to grow more popular.
And then marvel at how many people it took, to work on the RPG manual. I've been the DM for a Forgotten Realms campaign and wow, is that a lot of material.
My partner and I share a Tesla. It's 'mained' under her account. About 25%-50% of the times I enter the driver's seat - it varies depending on the version it's on - it forgets my driver profile and I have to reconfigure the mirrors and seat. This bug was first reported in 2020 IIRC and never fixed. Never buying another Tesla. Their only advantage is the network of superchargers.
Weird. Is your wife's phone nearby by chance? The only time this happens to me it's because we are both walking to the car together and her phone unlocks it before mine does.
And why would that feature rely on a phone in the first place instead of letting the driver change the profile when getting behind the wheel? Or e.g. use a fingerprint sensor or interior camera (which some of the Teslas do have)?
That sounds like some software guy somewhere didn't realize that those seats in the car aren't only for carrying air but that actual people or, gosh, occasional other drivers ride in them too.
Sadly this is rather symptomatic for many things coming out of Silicon Valley (not only Tesla).
It needs to let you select the seat _from the door_ before getting in, without access to the touch screen, else someone 6ft getting in after someone 5ft is in for a miserable time.
Even if she were near, I'd expect it to select her profile and let me select mine. Instead it deletes my profile entirely and I need to reconfigure my seat, mirrors, and any drive settings that are now at default.
There's a setting I just noticed for the first time this morning that lets you define a phone as the "primary" device - the description in the UI suggests its to prevent issues like you described. I'm not sure how long that feature is been there, but my phone is set up as the primary, and I've not had any weird profile issues. To be fair though, my wife rarely ever drives the Model 3, so we've had fewer chances to see any issues.
I'm a Relay user on Android, and the creator of Relay has said he may need to charge $3/mo for the app (previously was a buy-once for $2). It's useful enough for me to pay that much, and Reddit has every incentive and right to charge for API access. I think they did the community a disservice with the tight timeline and how they communicated the change, but I can survive $3/mo to pay for a service that I have enjoyed for well over a decade now.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
I'm torn on the Dilemma being my next because I currently still use my pinkys for double quote and quote. The 40 key layout here was what I was considering designing for myself but I'm not a fan of the inner-index offset. The Dilemma is a sweet design so I might just tweak it instead of starting from scratch, but starting from scratch would be more fun.
Check out the Miryoku layout (https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku). I use a modified version. For me, that keypress is inner-right-thumb, right index, middle, and pink pressing homerow keys, and the key above my left index.
Most enthusiast split keebs run on QMK or ZMK which allow you to customize the layout as you'd like including features such as layers, one-shot mods (press shift, next key you press is shift+key), macros, and key combos (press jk to emulate shift like some people do in vim).
> Cobra rates are quite affordable. I was on Cobra when I was laid off due to covid, and it was $550 a month for top tier healthcare.
Those two statements are in odds with one another. $550 is quite a large sum of money to put out each month, particularly when you don't have an income.
Yes, you should have quite a bit of cash as an emergency fund. There are government subsidies available for health insurance, but they phase out if you earn more.
Generally, decent insurance costs anywhere from $400 to $1,200 per month, depending on age of insured, plus up to $9k out of pocket maximum for individual and $18k for families, per calendar year.
So to adequate insure one’s self for healthcare expenses, you would need $18k or $36k for out of pocket expenses (since things can happen at end of calendar year), plus $400 to $1,200 per person per month minus any premium tax credits. For a young family, I would guesstimate $24k to $30k per year in premiums minus any tax credits.
Basically, be poor enough to qualify for free healthcare, or earn enough to be able to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars for a healthcare emergency, but try not to be inbetween.
