McAnally's (The Community Pub) > The Bar
New Weird
Dina:
I think you lost me, Bug.
Today is quite warm again, but yesterday's colt left many people under the weather, including my hubby.
Regenbogen:
I've heard about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, though it has been disproven in parts. I disagree with his thesis that if some peoples don't have words for a concept, they don't understand it. Because once it is explained to them they do understand. The concept just didn't exist in their culture. One can't pinpoint that to language alone. But I agree with the theory that language can form your way of thinking. Let's just take the example of English present and past continuous which doesn't exist for example in German. I remember having a hard time to understand it and I am still not always using it correctly. This doesn't mean that one can't express the meaning in German, but only that we have that choice to convey the information of a continous action, if we want to, but also to withhold it, when it is not important to what we are saying or we don't want the other to know. There are ways to insert prepositions to get the same meaning as the continuous tense in English.
But certain nuances can be lost in translation or need to be described in a roundabout way from one language to another.
While thinking about this, I had to think about George Orwell's 1984. Specifically their enforcement of New Speach. The government deliberately eliminated certain words and ways to express oneself. Like opposites for example. I can't remember one specifically. An example could be light and not-light instead of darkness. So the whole concept of darkness would vanish over time and everything that goes with it. Or happiness and not-happiness. So you are happy or you are not happy. Not being happy would be just the absence of happiness and not the presence of sadness instead. So happiness is the norm and if you are not happy, you simply lack happiness which subtly implies that you are not normal. Because there only is happiness. If you don't have happiness, you have nothing.
The goal was that they changed language to an artificial reduced basic form to prevent people from rebelling or even thinking of resistance simply because they lack the vocabulary necessary for such thoughts.
An interesting and frightening concept. And also not so far fetched. I had to stop reading at one point because I was shocked about the similarities to events in our time, both past and present. But no more about this here.
Today it was warm and I had a fever and a sore throat yesterday. I had to postpone the swimming lesson to Tuesday.
Today we met our neighbours on the street while watching a scary big spider. Spring is the time the spiders come into the houses to look for good places to hunt and make baby spiders. Whenever we have fit cats, they take care of most of them. I haven't seen any big spiders inside yet. But there is a new smaller one in the usual place on the terrace. I guess our Medusa has died again. Long live the new Medusa! She fights all the wasps who want to build their nests at our window. So she is allowed to stay. I once watched a fight between a spider and a wasp. The hero spider won. It was impressive and at the same time like a horror movie, lol.
Dina:
I begin by the ending. I have a not so mild arachnophobia, so I do not like that. But I have to admit that, objectively, spiders are amazing and very interesting creatures.
Hubby is better but I have a strong cold and I feel miserable. Still, better than yesterday. I remained at home today and I am taking care of myself because tomorrow I cannot miss my class and I did not want to risk to be worst.
The idea of language affecting thoughts is very interesting. Vygotski was a psychologist who wrote about how thoughts and language mingled. He studied how people with handicaps, like deaf or blind people, learnt. He found that usually deaf people had trouble reaching abstract thoughts because as children it was difficult to explain to them those concepts, while blind people could be told about them and grabbed them easily than deaf people . I am broadly simplifying things here, but Vygotski work is super interesting. I also remember having read something by Ursula LeGuin, but I do not remember the name of the work, where there was a society where the higher classes have a complex, well-developed language, but they forced the working class to speak in simpler terms. It was a plan to keep poor people dumb and easier to control.
BugBear:
You two both got the idea pretty much, yeah.
I personally go in for the soft version of Sapir-Whorf, where some concepts are simply easier or more difficult. You *can* translate everything if you *really want to,* but its possible to turn a sentence into a book that way, as you delve into the historical context surrounding the particular interpretation of the use of a particular verb (or what the fuck ever).
The historical context is every bit a part of the language as the word. If you don't understand it, you use the word inappropriately and are immediately tagged as an outsider.
Like how we've all been fluently speaking in multi-syllable. But if I started strutting around, stroking my chin, and muttering "mmm, yes, indubitably..." you would know I had been humping a thesaurus every night. And that it's *also* my favorite dinosaur.
That's why forcing the lower classes to use simpler language inhibits their cognition. If you have a duality of concepts, rather than a trinity, you have to compress more information into less space. Literally. Computationally.
You'd have to be a *motherfucking* wizard of a genius to compress full scientific disciplines into something instantly interpretable. And do that multiple times. You know. Just hypothetically, if someone from outside the ruling classes managed to build enlightenment, from scratch, in a cave with a box of scraps.
And PBS Spacetime on YouTube. That is a hidden gem of quality content.
Imma publish it.
BugBear:
Not really the space for this framing, but I'm not *just* talking about the RPG. It's just a super good metaphor.
Here's how you break the shit out of the Dresden Files RPG. The original, idk about accelerated.
While improving the game 10x for everyone at the table, exactly by doing so.
Between your High Concept, Trouble, and other Aspects, make sure you can justify literally any action your character could ever want to take. You'll probably have to give up the original character concept during the tweaking. That's fine, as long as you stay true to the correct intention/vibe, it'll turn out even better.
For your first time, it helps to choose dualistic concepts that oppose each other. Michael Capenter might have "Strike The Sin, Not The Man," but also "Hurt My Kids And We Go Old Testament."
This way, as long as the story has something to do with him (and therefore his family), he can self-compel either justice OR mercy. The player maintains a choice over his actions, but the narrative tension remains at maximum no matter what.
We all know that Michael has about as good odds of disappointing the White God as I do of spontaneously becoming a cabbage. But they hurt his little girl.
Meanwhile, the player is getting a fate point damn near every turn, as every action is a compel one way or another. Self compels really do work best, the GM probably doesn't have the attention required to do this for 4 people at once.
There is no way Michael doesn't have Guide My Hand. He's rolling Conviction for literally everything in Michael-focused arcs. AKA when he's "on the clock."
Do not fuck with Michael on the clock. Everyone knows this. Nick just took some teaching.
With some practice, you can pick up how to do it with 3 aspects "triangulating" action-narritive vectors. Idk how to put that in RPG terms, sorry.
You can do it with up to 8 aspects at once, but tbh thats just a lot of mental energy for a game. I'd probably stick to sets of 3 for simplicity's sake, and then see if I could get creative about mixing and matching them for extra self-compelled complexity.
It turns you into an absolute monster with Guide My Hand, too. Absolutely shit-fuck broken, literally makes the character single skill dependant. Then it's just trying to wrangle a +6 or higher out of the GM for Conviction. There might be other combos, idk.
As for why this applies to Weird:
I hope to use this in a game, one day. ;)
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