Yujiri's homepage

I'm a programmer, writer, and philosopher of all things. I post all kinds of stuff here.

Thanks to main_gi for countless contributions to this site. He's been my de-facto editor for a while, and has also helped me with CSS troubles, and even contributed valuable insight that got me to change some beliefs.

Update log:

August 23: I organized the game design index into a column layout like the other indexes with tons of content, and I added the first content of a new section: computer/programming stuff.
August 22: I extracted my discussion of brute force skills in game design out into its own article, and added How JRPGs Can Do Better: Bowser's Inside Story. I really need to make the game design index column-arranged...
August 21: Two new articles on storytelling: Why Representation Matters and How to choose a character's gender.
August 20: I edited my article on children in society.
August 18: Four new articles! The real meaning of political 'left' and 'right', An insight on the common error behind leftist economics, Don't amoralize your moral arguments, and Polymorphic values - and why you should avoid them.
August 13: I've gained a ton of new insight lately about how sleep, dreams, and death work, and finally got around to making an article. I also renamed my three theorems about choice and motivation to "axioms", since I found out a "theorem" is usually understood to be something proven with other premises - so basically the opposite of what I was using it to mean.
August 11, second entry: (Fist pump) I figured out CSS Grids and made the column formatting super sicku! Not only do the colunms stay aligned now, but the rows don't disbalance anymore; they'll even out as much as possible. And no more shitty hacks with div.row:after or any of that crap :)
August 11: Okay, maybe this is starting to get funny. Or maybe it's stopped being funny. I don't know, but I'm laughing at it a bit right now. I made another momentous revision to my moral system: freedom is no longer a prime value. I actually think I was taking out parts of Agency and Consent and making a third separate value where there isn't one.
And no, of course I'm not going to stay at 7 values :P (At least I hope not...) I'm also thinking about combining Compassion and Retribution into one value. After all, they're strictly diametric, aren't they? I mean they never get weighed against each other in the way that the other values do because they just cancel each other out in the first place and leave only the remaining magnitude of whichever was stronger. I mean obviously they can get played against each other in a complex situation where multiple people are involved, but that's only the sense in which any value could be played against itself. They never conflict on the same person in the same situation.
I've been occasionally using the phrase "the treatment rule" in my thoughts to refer to the combination of the two. I'll probably combine them once I figure out exactly what the treatment rule is (there are some questions I need to answer about how, mathematically speaing, the factors play together - I'd think the subject's moral merit has to be a multiplier in the formula, but then there'd have to be a 0 point, and that seems impossible).
It's extra poetic because I was recently swiftly convinced that base 6 is the best number system, whereas I had previously resigned myself to that not lining up with the number of cardinal moral values (I had eight and advocated base 12). It would be nice to have that back. Especially if the number of cardinal emotions ends up being 18 when I figure that out.
August 4: I edited my article on the anatomy of the soul with a new insight that memory reduces to instinct.
August 1: Phew! Today I migrated the server. It was a pretty involved process, reinstalling everything on a new operating system, but this will be better in the long run. No need to reboot every couple of days when nothing's changed. Learned a lot more about FreeBSD service files in the process.
July 31: I added an article on the misguided use of stats as a tool for game balance, and also I noticed that I don't think I ever logged my addition of the associated trait fallacy.
July 26: (It passed midnight less than an hour ago) I finally settled on a name for the Rebels WIP: The Pygon Hybrid.
July 25: Get this: my moral system redesigned once again.
The previous framing of my moral system was a remnant from when I had the 32-virtue model and I was still stuck in the rut of thinking about virtues as personality traits, due to how attached I was to the label "virtue ethics". That was why I had to divide some of my values into self-centered and other-centered versions, like Uncontainability and Liberation, because they seemed like different personality traits. But now that I understand a little more I can admit that they're the same value and the possibility of a person exhibiting one but not the other comes from - well, actually the same thing any such moral disparity does: one is easier for them due to their ideals.
In fact, I also retired my article on the inaction principle, because I think I was wrong about it. I was right that the person standing by the switch is being incredibly cruel, but wrong that it's the same as murder, because of how ownership works. The person being electrocuted was killed by nature and thus lost his right to life. This is a really good example of how an infallible conscience can lead to a wrong judgement in a hypothetical. I failed to consider the criminal's perspective, and so I failed to notice that when I considered active murder, I was acknowledging that the criminal must have some strong temptation to do this, while in the inactive murder case, I was implicitly discounting the motive and basically treating the criminal as strawman chaotic evil. When I consider that scenario with the criminal's motive in mind I can see how it's less evil than active murder. Of course, in such a case the magnitude of the cruelty of letting the person die when you can save them by just lifting a finger is probably so vast as to warrant violent punishment anyway, but it's not the same as a rights-violating murder.
July 21: I largely redid my review of Doki Doki Literature Club.
July 19: I've finally finished the massive revision to my beliefs about Rectitude! I'm still kind of unsure of some of it, so please point out if anything seems inconsistent or like there's a situation where it wouldn't hold. I've also made some edits to A critique of the field of evolutionary psychology to make my argument clearer and added a damning review of the storytelling model of Dark Souls and its ilk.
July 16: I added the Prismata "What Absorber Are You?" quiz :)
July 14: I edited the article on open-mindness after receiving a critique from main_gi. I qualified the claim to be more narrow in what it applies to and added a sentence at the end.
July 10: I edited my article on the problem with the language of rights to be a little clearer about the jump I'm criticizing and why it's a problem.
July 4: (change made on July 4 but I forgot to record until July 9) I added a paragraph on moral conflict about abortion and veganism, and edited my article on Anarchism to cast more light on the evil of taxation. I also fixed a broken link on my game design index: the link to the article on diagnosing the AAA industry was pointed to the article on Prismata's emote system.
July 3: New argumentation article: IQ Tests Are Superstitious Nonsense; along with edits to Citation fallacies.

I'm thinking about the overlap in topic between Protagonism articles and argumentation and debating. I put a couple of argumentation/logic-related articles under Protagonism because they had moral significance, but in a religion where Rationality is a virtue, that's kind of true of all the articles under argumentation. Should I move the one on Wikipedia's bias under there? I'm pretty sure I should move the one on defining by reference, but I also just noticed that one isn't actually referenced anywhere anymore. It was necessary back when I believed in Fuiki. It's still a nice little insight that I do stand by, so I'm not going to remove it or anything; I guess I'll move it.
July 2: I added some old (bad) hymn remixes I made a few years ago to my music index.
July 1: I edited my article on Anarchism to better explain how the poor would receive protection from crime without taxes or centralized police. I was re-reading Roderick's PDF because I'm lazy and like echochambers and I realized this point he made was a lot more profound than I realized at the time.
June 30: I added a game design article: Some Insight On The Trash Heap That Is AAA Video Games, and two new argument articles: A Critique of The Field of Evolutionary Psychology and "Open-mindedness" means nothing. The reason I didn't just put the latter as an entry under dirty tactics is because I'm thinking about reorganizing that article anyway. It's too long and should probably be split so I can more easily link to specific entries. I might end up categorizing it into psychology and linguistic exploits or something. I also added a point in my criticism of Revenge of the Sith.
June 29: HTML fix: I found a meta tag I could add that makes the site a lot more mobile-friendly. This is a big win. It's actually pretty easy; I just added one short line. I also have started making some of the old page URLs return 301 redirects instead of being symlinks to the real file on the server, so hopefully Google will stop indexing the old names.
June 28: A CSS fix: I went back to the navbar having position:fixed. The change I made fixed the problem of dynamic navbar height but at the cost (I didn't realize at the time) of introducing two more problems: since the scrollbar was then attached to the content div and not the page itself, keyboard scrolling no longer worked until you clicked on the page or something; and if the content of a page spanned the height of the viewport but not its width, the scrollbar would be positioned just to the right of the content instead of at the right edge of the window, which looked horrible. I realized the only part of the change that was necessary to fix the navbar height problem was the Javascript change, which I've retained, so that should all be good now.
June 25: I edited my review of Dark Souls to mention the one good thing about the game and improve a couple of the points I make against it and my review of Sekiro to mention how bad the stealth is.
June 21: I added an article on the problem with the language of rights. I'm also close to a major revamp of my beliefs about ownership, motivated by the realization of a couple of chinks in my current beliefs. There are still a few questions I'm not sure of though. With luck I'll have it figured out and posted in the next few days. (I'm actually also close to a change to my ontology of emotions that would revolutionize and simplify my philosophy of storytelling, but I consider that much lower priority to think about.)
June 18: I edited my review of The Good Ending mod for DDLC. I didn't understand PGP encryption as well as I thought I did when I wrote that before, so some of the stuff I said about the game file secrets wasn't very accurate. I understand the obstacles I encountered now and how I got past them.
June 17: I wrote another poem called Solitude. I also edited The Bright Raincloud (switching the second and third paragraphs) and reorganized the works index a bit.
June 15: I added an entry in my article on Wikipedia's bias.
June 14: I posted an article on The Wisdom of Prismata's Emote System, and played and reviewed the last Shattered Worlds installment I ever will.
June 13: I made some edits to Rebels. I also made some minor edits to several of the articles on storytelling.
June 12: I reorganized my article on consequentialism a bit.
June 9: Over the last couple of days, I've come to finally understand my conscience's signals behind the virtue of "Purity". I see the common thread and it makes sense now. I posted a separate article on it that the virtue article now links to.
June 3: With main_gi's help, I fixed a CSS issue where the navbar would overlap the top of the content if the window was narrow enough that the navbar needed more than two lines of text. I've also been changing my philosophy on "casual games", with a new article added and an edit to my article on roles of games. I've also edited the criticisms in my review of Lost Odyssey. Update: I also published an unrelated article with a nice clickbait title: Defend Your Right To Resign. Update: I revised my arguments on Consequentialism to better explain why I'm not contradicting myself.
June 2: I've made some minor edits to my Prismata index, mostly improving style and presentation; edits to action scenes in prose, in particular mentioning the idea that combat-heavy stories may be overdone; and I published an article on double standard arguments against young-Earth creationism.
June 1: I posted a new article on Concepts of Property and Ownership, and reorganized the Protagonism index layout a bit. In storytelling I added significant content to dialog in prose and a new entry to sexist tropes. I also made a CSS edit to add more space below the navbar, because I noticed that on pages with really long navbar text if the viewport was narrow enough the navbar would exceed the expected space and cut off the top of the content. It's a bandaid fix since ideally the offset should dynamically depend on the height of the navbar, but CSS is such a useless heap of complexity I couldn't easily figure out how to do that. With luck I'll find time for it tomorrow.
May 31: I added a storytelling article on Don't use philosopher characters to make fun of philosophy and a Protagonism article on coaching in competitive games.
May 28: I added a Protagonism article on the anatomy of souls and their prime faculties.
May 23: Removed the mention of balancing on the Notes on Choice and Morality. I decided that it could be explained by novelty fun when it's across time, and when it's not across time I don't think the effect exists except for physical pain, which can be explained by the brain scaling what looks like it should be a linear trigger into an exponential perception. I also added an entry in my article on inflammatory techniques and removed a paragraph in my article on worldbuilding that raised an invalid criticism of Mass Effect.
May 21: Added a mention of the idea of a "prophecy" in my article on time travel. (This edit was made on May 21, but forgot to note it until the 23rd.)
May 20: I reorganized the Works section somewhat (renaming it to that from Fiction), and added my first poem to it.
May 18: I put the DDLC Festival mod review back up, after major edits. I also edited my review of Mass Effect to link to Shamus Young's 75-part retrospective, edited Notes on Choice and Morality, added a expand-note in The Moral System that explains an apparent problem with my beliefs, and added an entry to Observations on Linguistic Connotations on sarcasm and why it's so powerful.
May 17: I added a new article: Wikipedia's neutrality policy is a sham. I disabled justification on the site because I found that the chromium browser wasn't responding to it right; it was justifying the links in column-arranged pages and it looked terrible and I wasn't sure immediately how to fix it.

I've done a massive amount of editing DDLC mod reviews. I even had to reread the scripts for OFH to find out how badly my memory had gotten warped. I took down The Festival review for similar reasons (I actually found out that there was quite a bit of content I missed - not sure if it got added since or what). I'll probably put it back up tomorrow when I've had time to go through it all. I also added links on my main DDLC page to the rpatool and unrpyc tools on github that I use for decompiling scripts, and linked my own mod in the list, because why not ;)
May 14: Because I am lazy, I played and reviewed another DDLC mod: Fruits of the Literature Club.
May 13: Minor updates to Protagonism; I added a mention of the temporal distance-scaling principle on my moral system, a mention of intellectual property on inaction, and I noticed that the article When Discrimination Is Good wasn't linked from the Protagonism index anymore. I don't know when that happened. I must have removed it accidentally one of the times I was fiddling with the CSS. I put it back. I also rewrote the article to give an explanation that seems clearer to me.
May 12: In A Psychology-Based Approach to Competitive Game Design, I added a point under the criterion of segment size about accessibility.
May 10: A lot of minor edits that aren't worth noting, but in particular I revamped my article on sexist tropes in storytelling for improved presentation. I've cut back on sweeping claims about trends or statements that look insane until you read farther on (in particular I edited the tagline of the entry on balance in combat roles) and given better explanations of why stereotypes are harmful in real life. I also added a paragraph to my article on time travel.
May 8: A change to my emotion philosophy. This might actually be the last one: I made the decision to reseparate empowerment and engagement. I thought so long and hard about this decision until I realized that doing this left me with 5 groups of 2 intrinsic emotions instead of one of the groups being weirdly missized. I'm sure this has to be right. Also some minor edits to my article on matchmaking queue systems.
May 6: Phew, it's been a while... been working hard on Doki Doki: Aftermath. And I am making good progress. Today I have significant updates to my review of Doki Doki Rainclouds, including a suggestion at how to improve one of the most disappointing scenes and a draft except from it; and some editing of my article on portraying extreme emotions in storytelling.
April 29: I added an article on time travel in storytelling. I also justified the text on the entire website. I've gained a huge appreciation for justification lately and so I decided to look into doing it with CSS. Unlike everything else in CSS, it's actually really easy.
April 27: I've greatly revamped my arguments about the existence of the soul; there's now only one article. I also removed my link to the zerothposition blog on my Anarchism article. I was reading a new article there and I was horrified. That guy is genuinely a real sexist and I think referring people to his articles might turn them off from our shared beliefs more than it would add to the arguments Roderick and I have given. I've also revised somewhat my list of prime emotions; I'm still unsatisfied with my understanding of the psychology of competition.
I also have been reminded by main_gi that I forgot to mention a new article a few days ago: The Disaster of Reddit's Voting Mechanic.
April 25: New entries in Observations on Linguistic Connotations, two new foreword paragraphs at the index of argumentation and debating, edited the entry on filibustering in dirty tactics to explain the technique of submissive interrupting more, and a new article on queue settings.
April 24: Some edits of presentation rather than substance to my reviews of Mistborn and Lost Odyssey, and to the Notes on Choice and Morality; and reorganized the page on the centerpiece of Protagonism to put part of it on the Protagonism index and the meat of it back into a dedicated article on axiology like I used to have. I wanted to do this so I could link to the axiology article without the first paragraph of it being specifically about the pitch of Protagonism. Finally, after another two hours of CSS frustration I managed to make an improvement to the two pages with column layouts: when the screen is too narrow to fit them all on one row, it'll expand them so they still take up the entire width (if the window is only slightly narrow it'll first compress the columns a bit before stacking them), whereas before it would just waste the extra space.
April 23: I mostly reverted the big change to Pillars of Life. See the changelog for details. I'm still very happy with the result, though. I also made some edits to my article on PvP shooter modes.
April 22: Huge edit to Pillars of Life! Also some minor edits to the entry on relativist rhetoric in dirty tactics.
April 21: I added a point to my article in defense of Retribution. I think I might have made some other edits in the last two days that I forgot to note, but I can't remmeber.
- I separated out the discussion of how to mitigate the bore of waiting in a turn-based game into its own article.
- I added a point about button mashing in the Sekiro review.
April 18: A sicku update to my religion: I decided that Reverence could be reduced to the other virtues! And now there's twelve - an elegant number. I'm almost certain I have the right number of them now. I might still have the details off. But you know, when I first scrapped the 32-virtue model in favor of the 18 one, I thought 18 was a less elegant number and that was one thing that bothered me a bit. It got really bad when I reduced it to 17; I knew that wasn't right and I had to find a way to reduce it more until I arrived at an elegant number. I never thought I'd make it as low as twelve.
April 16: New Game Design articles: Feedback Loops, and A Psychology-Based Approach To Competitive Game Design. The latter is a rather massive article I just finished writing in light of significant revisions to my beliefs. It replaces the old article "Pillars of Strategy Game Design", as it generalizes on those concepts to get closer to the underlying principles (it now applies to action games as well). In the near future I intend to generalize this further so it can apply to all games without losing specificity, and I'm probably also going to do a lot more rearranging of the other articles.
April 15: I revised my ontology of emotions somewhat, and added a new game design article: The Importance of Turn Timers.
April 14: I've added a review of Sekiro, and greatly edited my review of Dark Souls.
April 11: I did a lot of editing of many of my game design articles. I completely rewrote the one on progress saving, trying to get to the actual claim sooner and be more clear instead of leaving an apparent contradiction until the end, and also tried to give it a funny beginning. I also edited the article on dirty tactics, combining the gift ploy and agreeing to disarm into one tactic, as I realized they're just different forms of the same psychology exploit; and I added an entry: relativist rhetoric.
April 10: I added chapter 7 of Rebels! And also a huge change to my philosophies about emotions; I've decided that anticipatory feelings are actually just partial-certainty reactionary ones and subverted feelings are just magnitude-bolstered by the same probability-scaling factor I already mentioned (which, to top this all off, I've also realized can be explained by that you've already half-accepted what's going to happen, so it feels like the magnitude of the final event is halved when it arrives). This is in preparation for a major revamp of my game design philosophies; I was thinking about simplifying them and that my 11 goals of strategy games had to be reducible somewhat and it led me to all this. Update: I've also significantly revised my moral system once more; the Retribution doctrine got yet another rewrite; Compensation is no longer its own virtue; I've added explanations of the concepts of redemption and restitution and how they're separate; and I edited the desciptions of Compassion (adding an expand note) and Equity. Update: I made some edits to my reviews of Lord of the Rings (adding the monarchy objection which I somehow forgot, and elaborating a bit more of some other points) and Harry Potter (elaborating on why time travel in stories is bullshit). Update: I also added an article under argumentation on the Myth of Respect.
April 8: Some updates to the Rebels WIP; and I edited the Counterplay Infinity description page. I realized that I was making sweeping claims about design trends in mainstream fighting games that I wasn't qualified to make; I added an admission and made it clear which games I'm talking about.
April 5: There have been some major updates to Counterplay Infinity. Sorry I haven't been updating this site much, but my real-life programming pseudo-job got really intense and I was putting some 6 hours a day into it. I've also finally (maybe) made significant progress on solving the canon issues I must in order to proceed with DDA.
April 1: Added Counterplay Infinity (see above) :) Also edited the article I posted yesterday on "two theorems of behavior and motivation", adding more ideas to it and renaming it to "Notes on Choice and Morality"; and revised again my Retribution doctrine. I might have actually arrived at the final form this time.
March 31: I solved some significant issues with Protagonist philosophy (relating to the exact calculation of merit/guilt from an action). I've updated the centerpiece, virtue list articles and added a new article on two theorems of behavior and motivation. Not to mention, I scrapped the virtue of Symbolicism, deciding it could be reduced to Ambition (which I altered the wording of) and in some aspects Retribution (the current statement of it doesn't 100% reflect what I believe, in that there are exceptions to the NAP; but I haven't figured out what the unifying thread I'm missing is).
March 29: I added a new article on writing dialog in prose fiction and some minor clarifications to my article on The centerpiece of Protagonism. I also did an editing pass on my review of Harry Potter, review of Dark Souls and review of Spy Kids 2.

I think writing these articles is not a very efficient way for me to be working, but it's so easy right now. On all of my other projects I feel blocked. Rebels, my current programming project, and Doki Doki Aftermath (especially the latter two) both require me to think hard before I can go on as opposed to just writing thoughts I already have and that don't have to be held to the same standard of quality. (It's especially easy since I have a directory with like 10 half-written articles on the middle three categories of my site.) But at the same time I'm starting to feel really bad about how long it's been since I posted new content on Rebels and DDA. Especially DDA; I don't want to leave the fans hangi- I mean waiting. But so many canon questions to answer and so hard :'(
March 28: I actually retired the article on the Last Second Rescue, because I decided it wasn't saying anything profound or not already said by thousands of other storytelling philosophers. I've added an article on foreshadowing, and edited the article on plot to link to it. I also made some edits to my reviews of Sword Art Online (improving the explanation of why the Level 70 revelation scene was so bad and reordering some other points) and Star Wars, adding criticisms of Attack of the Clones and The Force Awakens after I was reminded of things I had forgotten.
March 27: Posted a new article on action scenes in prose and one on things that are not Ad Hominem. Also added a new entry to the article on dirty tactics (definition forcing) and extended the entry on agreeing to disarm, as well as a little notice at the top of the argumentation index.
March 26: Minor edits to the "Rebels" WIP and the article on disparate tastes in fiction.
March 25: Some edits to my Protagonism pages on the centerpiece (adding some content from the old no_why article that I didn't copy over when I made the new centerpiece) and the prime emotions (categorizing them and solving the concept of status).
March 23: Even more radical changes to my religion have taken place than ever before. I've dropped the concept of Fuiki and actually rewrote the Centerpiece article; I eliminated a couple of virtues that seemed reducible to others (although I'm almost cerain the current system still isn't exactly right because it's not elegant enough); and I even decided that there's no meaningful difference between happiness/sadness and fun/boredom as categories, so I merged the two articles.
March 21: In light of more conversations I've been having with main_gi, I've updated my article on mental health and how messed up the concept is.
March 20: I've upgraded my article on Anarchism. In particular, I improved the explanation of the moral individualism in the opening section, added sentences in the section on advantages of decentralized law enforcement to explain how the same advantages don't apply to a police model, and greatly expanded the section on how an Anarchist society would fend off a foreign invasion.
March 19: I've been doing a lot of thinking about the nitty-gritty of the formulas that calculate virtue and vice in my religion, and updated the relevant page to account.
March 18: I made significant edits to the "Rebels" WIP, and also some minor CSS improvements on both novels. Let me know if I missed either change breaking anything.
March 17: I've added a new article on boilerplate rules under argumentation, an entry on sore winning to inflammatory techniques, and two entires on ridiculing hypotheticals and independence shaming to dirty tactics, as well as expanding the entry on agreeing to disarm. Several hours later, I reorganized my article on how government encourages discrimination into a broader article on how government encourages not only discrimination, but also dishonesty and dirty argument tactics, and also creates violent conflict between people who have nothing against each other.
March 10: Well, I never thought this would happen. I just massively revised my virtue philosophy so that there are only 18. Check it out. I also edited the articles that reference it (let me know if I missed any). I spent the next eight hours or so redoing Pillars of Life to account. I mean, I know it's kind of bad practice to seriously change a finished novel that long after it's been posted, but in the case where it makes it seem less like religious preaching, it was more than worth it. Especially since I think the number of people who have actually read the novel is probably less than 10...
March 9: I edited my explanation of emotional control in the article on miscellaneous psychology insights. I'm starting to think the virtue of Sanctity doesn't exist as I've defined it. I was thinking virtues like Retribution and Compassion only encompasses physical action while Sanctity took all the weight of choosing to feel. I thought they had to be separate because I could imagine a person who did one but not the other. But my new explanation makes me wonder if I was wrong; that difference can be explained by a disparity in other virtues (eg. Stoicism versus Heroism or Resilience).
March 8: In light of more conversations I've been having with main_gi, I've actually retracted my article on currency. In much smaller news, I added some story criticisms to my review of Assassin's Creed.
March 6: I added a review of Assassin's Creed and an article on the end justifying the means.
March 5: I edited my arguments for the existence of the soul to hopefully be a little harder to weasel out of with willful irrationality. I have a way of saying it that's even more undeniable from a logical perspective, but I'm worried that it's easier to get hung up on linguistics, so I didn't go with it.
March 4: I added a brief article that I'll be expanding later on linguistic connotations, and another article on disparate tastes in fiction and what can cause them despite the quality of fiction being objective. I also reformatted the storytelling article index to use a multi-column layout like the Protagonism index, but I'm super dissatisfied. I learned along the way that neither one actually uses the space on the page properly for all screen sizes. I sunk several frustrating hours into Google trying to find out how to make the CSS work, but I couldn't find a way. I learned that they took out the min and max functions in CSS3. What the actual fuck? Like I'm sure they had some kind of reason but I can't see how it could be possibly be big enough to justify this. And the W3C documentation still mentions them, which adds to the frustration.

Update: I also edited my extremely critical review of Sword Art Online. That was one of the first articles I ever wrote on this site, and my ideas - as well as my skill at presenting them - have evolved significantly.
March 3: More edits to the "Rebels" WIP - see dedicated changelog. Also, I feel like I should explain now that the reason I continue to put it in quotes and explicitly identify it as a WIP every time is because I'm worried that someone new to my site will stumble on here and get the impression that I'm stupid enough to actually name a novel "Rebels".
March 2: I did a lot of revising several of my game design articles. Sorry I don't remember exactly what all I changed, so if you want to see all the changes you might have to reread a lot.
March 1: I added two entries in my articles on Dirty argument tactics: disallowing opinion, and agreeing to disarm; and some edits to statistics and citation fallacies.
February 27: I edited the part of my review of Doki Doki Literature Club where I mentioned my theory about Monika's deletion spree in Act 4 being a mercy kill. I realized that that theory is pretty much debunked by Monika's line "I won't let you hurt him" prior to doing it.
I also fixed a really embarrassing mistake in my article on villains... I had written under Zerik at the bottom "but he's still much better than a lot of other popular villains (see above)", when I gave much higher scores to all the villains I analyzed above him. It was because I wrote that during an early draft of the article where I had a bunch of Star Wars villains on there, but I didn't end up including those (I'll probably finish their sections and put them in later).
February 26: I added some content to my article on the second tier of human experience - I finally finished understanding the sorrow/anger choice thing that Thale mentioned! (I realize what I said is completely different from what Thale and Telra said. My position is that their logic is what Lucy is using to justify her choice, but the true underlying motivation is wrong.)
February 23: I did some minor editing of a lot of my DDLC mod reviews, in particular The Good Ending (adding more of the secrets). Update: I also edited my article on the prime emotions, renaming several of them.
February 21: I added a paragraph to the article on children in society about the use of "minor".
February 18: I wrote an article on difficulty settings and why almost every game should have them.
February 17: I made some edits to Rebels, and to my game design articles on retraversal and good and bad difficulty.
February 16: I published an article on children in society, one on bad choices in games, and one on forking player interests in games. I also shifted around some of the content of the other game design articles to account for the change.
February 14: I added an article on the concept of "mental health" and how messed up it is. I acutally added this a few days ago and forgot to mention it here.
February 13: I added an entry in my article on inflammatory techniques, as well as some minor edits to the parent article on dirty tactics.
February 11: I watched Spy Kids 2 and reviewed the piece of shit.
February 9: I rewatched Return of the Jedi, and updated my review of Star Wars. This might actually be the worst Star Wars movie.
February 8: In light of conversations I've been having with main_gi about puzzle games, I reconsidered my philosophy on the "roles of games". I've now revamped my taxonomy into a three-dichotomy system. In addition, there's a new review (Spy Kids).
February 7: I published a new DDLC video :)
February 5: I finally finished and posted chapter 6 of the Rebels WIP! I also greatly revamped my article on moral choices in video games.
February 3: I added an article on the taboo of vanity and a brief rant on the use of "extremism" as a negative ideograph.
January 31: I added an article on portraying extreme character emotions in fiction.
January 30: I'm writing on this on the 31st because I forgot yesterday, but I played Shattered Worlds: Hope For Change and posted a review of it.
January 27: I've added a new article on villains in fiction. About time, huh?
January 26: I reorganized the article on nonreactionary feelings and a few thoughts I hadn't published yet into a new article on miscellaneous psychology insights. I've also made several minor edits to the Protagonist virtue list.
January 25: I expanded my article on magic system design to say more about the idea of an experience being required to unlock magic, and I added some criticisms of the ending of Doki Doki Literature Club. I still think it's easily the best work of fiction I've ever seen and quite possibly the best in human history, but it isn't perfect. I also renamed the Protagonistic virtue of Boldness to Stoutness, since the name Boldness was a holdover from when my definition of it was narrower; I broadened the definition of Honesty; and I added a new article on "moral conflict".
January 23: I revised my arguments against the idea that power corrupts.
January 22: I rewatched The Empire Strikes Back, and added several criticisms in my review of Star Wars. I also added a few criticisms of A New Hope that I forgot.
January 21: I greatly expanded my article on themes, adding analyses of Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Assassins' Creed 1, and Assassins' Creed 3; I added two entries in my article on Dirty Tactics in Argumentation; and I made some edits to Pillars of Life - see the dedicated changelog for details.
January 20: I greatly expanded my article on plot, in particular adding explanation to the six traits I claimed.
January 19: I've been making some minor modifications to the "Rebels" WIP. I was stuck for a long time thinking about how chapter 6 should go, but I'm finally making some progress on it. I also added some paragraphs to my article on forms of punishment. Finally I edited my review of Doki Doki Literature Club to better describe just what was so perfect about Sayori's death scene and my objection to the Natsuki weekend scene.
January 15: I added a new article on the prime forms of fun under Protagonism, and reviews of Mass Effect and Spellweaver.
January 14: I made another significant edit to Protagonist virtue philosophy, replacing the virtue of Honor (which I felt was sufficiently accounted for by Compassion) with "Self-Respect", and rewatched A New Hope and edited my review. The movie was a lot worse than I remembered.
January 13: Believe it or not, I already wrote chapter 5 from scratch and published it.
January 12: I added chapter four of the "Rebels" WIP! I also made a few changes to chapter 3; see the dedicated changelog.
January 11: I'm trying out a solution to the inline objection problem. I've used Javascript to implement the tvtropes-style expandables, only with buttons. You can see it on the centerpiece of Protagonism page. Let me know what you think! Edit: I've also reformatted the Protagonism index to use a multiple column layout instead of listing all the links on the very left so that only a quarter of the screen gets used, and added a new article on the nature of philosophy under argumentation and debating, as well as an article on definition by reference under Protagonism.
January 10: Added an article on the more gradual and symmetric way I think about morality as opposed to the traditional black-and-white negative obligation-based model.
January 9: I forgot exactly what all I did, but I know I added two new articles about emotions under Protagonism (here and here), merged the article defending Fuiki into the Centerpiece page, and a lot of minor revisions to the presentation of my arguments in various articles. I'm getting very dissatisfied with my site and the way I'm writing it. It blows my mind that there isn't a built-in way to do templating with HTML, and I don't wanna learn something that completely changes the way I write my articles and requires me to learn a new syntax like Jade, or mess with Nginx settings or something. I'm also getting the feeling that a lot of people who read my Protagonism articles (if anyone still does, IDK) are being lost because they read one thing that sounds crazy and just leave before they get to part where I acknowledge and answer their objection. Inlining responses to everything seems too encumbered. I guess I could use Javascript to create expandable "note" tags like tvtropes has... but I think some people browse with Javascript disabled.
January 8: Merged the Protagonism articles on freeloading, land ownership, and the "ownership backlash effect", into a new article, as I realized all three beliefs stemmed from the same principle. Besides that, I finally got around to watching Solo, and wrote a review of it (7 criticisms). Finally, I made a huge formatting improvement to the whole site. I've replaced the single backlinks at the bottom of each page with a full navbar at the top where you can go multiple levels up in a single click. Blame that if any links are broken or anything :)
January 7: Significant changes to Protagonist virtue philosophy. I broadened my idea of the virtue of Boldness and revised Ardence and Sanctity. I think I might have it all right now. I also added a new article on how morality cannot ultimately be explained by reason, as well as how it's possible to be wrong about it when you have an infallible conscience.
January 6: An edit to the penultimate chapters of Pillars of Life (see the dedicated changelog) and a similar edit to the first chapter of the "Rebels" WIP (dedicated changelog). Also changed the fourth subvirtue of Kindness in my religion from Solidarity (which I decided was encompassed by Reverence and Asceticism) to Compensation "Reward acts of virtue in others". I've also changed the definition of Fairness slightly, so that it doesn't say anything about factoring in moral differences to how you treat people, only not factoring in superficial differences (I felt that the old definition could kind of be seen to encompass both Retribution and Compensation). I also edited my articles on the Pillars of Strategy Game Design, Citation-related fallacies and Statistics in argumentation, and my review of Star Wars (mainly added criticisms of the prequels).
January 5: Significant update on the "Rebels" fiction WIP, and I'm also trying out some formating changes on both novels. Instead of the first line of a paragraph being indented, subsequent lines are indented (which makes more sense to my programmer mind). I also reduced the spacing between paragraphs. Let me know if you think it's too little now. Update later the same day: I edited out agency as a criterion for hero design (so everyone's scores have changed), added an article on worldbuilding, and received a few more grammar and spelling corrections from main_gi (including some in MC's Revenge). Also made some edits to a few lines of dialog in Pillars of Life (see the dedicated changelog).
January 4: Revised the arguments for Anarchism. I noticed that my old article focused almost entirely on the principle-based side of things rather than the consequential side. In other words, it spent its entire time explaining why government was evil rather than why Anarchy was workable. I've added several paragraphs to refute common objections to the practicality of Anarchy. I also ran a script that changed all my in-site links to open in the same window instead of in a separate tab, and I'm not certain that a few things aren't still messed up from my poor coding ability. If you want to open a link in a new tab, you can always do that with ctrl-click (at least in Firefox). Finally, I added a point in my criticism of Return of the Jedi.
January 3: New article on argument and debating: Inflammatory techniques - how to provoke your opponent. The entry in Dirty Tactics on metadebating has been moved there, and Dirty Tactics now links to it.
January 2: Edited the review of Attack on Titan to link to the article on glorification of characters.
December 31: Posted the publicly-navigable download for MC's Revenge, a DDLC mod I've made. It's under fiction.
December 29: Revised the Protagonist list of virtues in light of new philosophical insights I've had. Most notably, the virtue of "Manipulation" has been broadened, and is now called "Fecundity". I've also swapped the names of Sanctity and Reverence, as well as a few minor changes to the descriptions of many other virtues.
December 28: Added three points in my criticism of The Last Jedi, and added Rogue One (two criticisms). Also added a new entry in the article on Dirty Tactics in Argumentation: Filibustering.
December 22: Added an article on glorification of characters under fiction rants.
December 21: I'm writing this on the 21st, but I actually posted new content a few days ago and I just forgot to note them here at the time. So there's now a review of Dark Souls as well as the "True Route" mod for DDLC. Also wrote a new article on morals of a story, under fiction rants.
December 16: Fixed a lot of grammatical and spelling errors pointed out by main_gi.
December 15: New article on game design: "Retraversal - Bad".
December 13: Minor edit to my novel Pillars of Life (see the dedicated changelog for details).
December 12: Formatting improvement on the novels (the top bar now tracks like the left bar); Added the music section of the site; Added a paragraph in the article "Don't Interrupt The Game" under game design rants about unskippable cutscenes.
December 11: New entry in the article on Dirty Tactics in Argumentation: Ideograph abuse