Guest post: It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Originally a comment by latsot on A fate worse than.
It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. We shouldn’t be altogether surprised when a Grue turns up.
I have tremendous sympathy for people who feel alone, unloved and unrepresented. We have systematically failed those people for as long as we’ve been people and we don’t appear to have learned much along the way. People are feeling desperate about gender identity? I sympathise. Heaven fucking forbid that we try to fix societal expectations, though. It’s obviously far better to reinforce that gender bullshit by mutilating children and.. well… what then?
Seriously. Many of the things I do for a living require that I keep really quite complex and usually inconsistent models in my mind and then reason about them. I’m quite good at it. I’ve written papers about it in fancy journals and everything. But I cannot keep track of this shit. I can not follow any path of reasoning through this mess, regardless of any conceits, fudge-factors or straight up dimwitted logic blindness. There is just no way to render this position in a tractable number of dimensions.
I know we know this and my frustration is kind of abstract. But there are children who are being THE OPPOSITE OF HELPED. I don’t know what to do about it because every attempt is scooted into the TERF bin before anyone has bothered thinking about it.
We didn’t have this problem when we were complaining about religion or homeopathy, did we? There was always a bloc of people who couldn’t be turned, a bunch of (as we leaned, mostly obnoxious) people on our side, a few fence-sitters who could occasionally be turned and a lot of places to feel smug about our skepticism.
We knew where we were in those days. We skeptics turned out to be proper arseholes for the most part but we could probably do with a bit more old-skool randi-ish skepticism about the place. Only without the misogyny. And the bullying.
Ah fuck it, I have no idea what to do. But I hate it that children are becoming weapons in a battleground absolutely nobody understands.
Somewhat of an aside, it is probably unlikely that most people get the references (“maze of twisty passages all alike”, “Grue”): latsot is referencing a truly classic computer game from the dawn of multiprocessing, when truth actually mattered. Those were the days, weren’t they? When the “truth” of a claim was judged by how well it corresponded to observed reality, rather than how some group of people felt about it.
When truth mattered? Didn’t someone write a book about that?
I refuse to accept that everyone else didn’t spend as much time playing Zork as I did.
You can still play it! https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_vq/zork (and various other places) and I recommend you do.
The grue will eat you.
I didn’t get them but I could tell they were references. Was going to look up the twisty passages but then forgot to.
As I recall, there were 2 mazes: One had “twisty little passages, all alike”, and the other had “twisty little passages, all different”. Make of that what you will.. Plugh.
I think that was Colossal Cave.
Ha, I looked up Grue, saw that it was related to an old computer game called Zork, and then tuned out because I’m a latecomer to the online world and feel a bit intimidated, given that I’ve never played an online game with its own world.
Good post, latsot. :)
Collosal Cave, aka Dungeon, aka Adventure, was indeed the one with the two “twisty” mazes. The “all alike” maze rooms all had identical descriptions (“A maze of twisty little passages, all alike”), while the rooms in the “all different” maze each had a unique description (“A little twisting maze of passages, all different”, “A twisty maze of little passages…”, “A maze of twisting little passages…”, and so on, in all possible permutations).
I remember mapping the mazes. I remember finishing the game with the maximum 150 points (you had to figure out where to put the magazines to get that last point). Good times, all pre-internet.
Good times indeed, there were some great text adventures. Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy was another brilliant effort (there are online versions dotted about). That damnable babel fish. There has been a bit of a resurgence recently, although today it is called interactive fiction, and there are some fairly decent tools around for creating these games.
A few years back I worked with a charity supporting children who are carers to help them write interactive fiction about their lives so that people could better understand their needs. It was only partly successful due to the fact that these kids didn’t have enough time to devote to writing the games, which kind of highlights the biggest problem they have. But it was a fun thing to do.
I wrote a multi-user text adventure during the first year of my degree. It became weirdly popular across quite a few universities around the world, but mostly as a place to hang out and chat, hardly anyone bothered to actually play the game. Then the university shut it down for no specified reason and told me off, bastards.
latsot, it sounds like the university may have prevented you from becoming Mark Zuckerberg with his billions. You should sue. ;-)
HGTG was great, one of the best text adventure games of all time! It was written by a college classmate of mine, a guy who lived two floors above me in the dorm and who was known to go around in a gorilla suit occasionally.
I wrote a simple single user text adventure once; a fun project, mostly to try my hand at the TADS language. I tip my hat to you and your popular multi-player game that drew the ire of the administration; a high honor indeed.
@iknklast
I think it’s probably for the best. Billionaire me would probably do untold harm. There’s a reason I mostly work alone these days.
@Sakbut
To me that guy is a celebrity and for no good reason at all I’m impressed that you know him.
Then you would fit in well with most of the other (perhaps all of the other) billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg.