Someone once shared [ESR's LARP resume](http://www.catb.org/~esr/larp.html) with me, and now I must pass this burden of knowledge onto you all
>I consider myself a skilled and veteran player suitable for major and even leading roles — in fact my success tends to be directly proportional to my degree of involvement in major plot lines. `Spear-carrier' roles make me feel cramped and unhappy and I usually flub them. This is not exactly because I have ham tendencies (though I do) it's that I don't find small roles much of a challenge any more.
>The pattern in most of the characters I have played best and enjoyed most is that they are all types who get their leverage from intelligence and puzzle-solving ability — high-level scientist or sorcerer types. One of them, "The Brain", made me the runner-up for the `Best Player' award in the first Ace Of Spades game at Balticon (and achieved all his character goals in his second appearance at the Floating Vagabond). Another (Dr. John Myriad) saved the planet Earth twice — once in Rekon-1B (my first game) and again in Rekon+10, a decade later.
>In the last decade, however, I have been doing more in the way of pure dramatic roleplaying. My Cyrano de Bergerac in King's Musketeers II barely met a single one of his goals, but was much praised during and after the game for sheer melodramatic intensity (not to mention being showered with style points by the Cruel Hoax referees, not an easy crowd to impress).
>My preference is to play a "Good" or "Neutral" character, but I would play a villain if necessary to get a stronger part. Usually I'd rather play an independent than a faction follower or even leader. When intriguing, I do a lot of win-win negotiating and often find myself in a pivot or power-broker position between several factions (I do have some `schemer' tendencies, though I usually prefer not to play pure schemer characters). My playing style is also marked by the fact that I almost never lie to anyone, preferring to find ways to make the truth serve my ends (by misdirection, if necessary).
>Many game forms oppose "character acting" against "strategic success". For me, the two aren't separable. All my `winning' characters have been intensely character-acted; conversely, when I've been handed a character that I couldn't method-act my way into I've generally crashed and burned. Give me a character that fits and a little rope and I'll generate as much drama as you could ask for.
Yeah, though in the late Slashdot era it was already getting pretty obvious that he'd lost it. He's a good case study on someone who got lost in the wilderness.
"Hacked".
Dude has complained about the lack of employments available for polyamorists skilled in martial arts. This is just his way of making up the shortfall.
[That happens a lot. It just tends to happen to people who have just sent pictures of their cock on Twitter. They're all hacked.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhtbEljxNFw&t=860s)
Before I get to those specifics, I want to try to convey that sense
of what it was like. I was a bright geeky kid in the 1960s and 1970s,
immersed in a lot of obscure topics often with an implicit common theme:
intelligence can save us!
Save us from what? iirc esr doesn’t believe in climate change (or
whatever weasily way people nowadays say ‘well, the science isn’t as
clear as I like so we shouldn’t do anything’).
E: and it isn’t just this, the whole ‘lets try to think more clearly’
is a project with no clear goals apart from that, and which has brings
little success to their lives when they end up thinking more clearly.
Esr has been doing this for 50 years apparently, and he has little to
show for it (I mean just look at this post, once again, it is way too
long).
E2: ow look his definition of new humans excludes people with adhd.
Thats nice. (at least somebody in the comments improves on it so it
isn’t this exclusionary, honestly nice work there lesswronger (the ‘I
try to avoid places where im less rational’ thing, still weird, but if
that is what you want to do fine)).
E3: not one piece of work referenced was published after 1995.
E4: Random shower thought from earlier. Considering how much the
LW/Rationalist types love secret societies and secret groups, they prob
never got why A Brave New World’s world was bad. They would have all
loved to go to ‘thinkers island’. (Lot of the SF he likes also has
people with psychic powers mascarading as science btw (at least the
foundation series, and NUL-A are,
I have never read gulf, as far as I can remember)).
Oh god someone needs to pitch the Onion on making daily or weekly MBTIoscopes a thing.
"INFP: You will meet a stranger who invites you on a trip. Go with them. Your lucky number today is 34."
For some reason I never really thought about EY as the next
generation’s ESR, but it makes sense (right down to the libertarianism).
Except ESR did, like, actually do some programming.
I've wondered sometimes about who might have been "the LessWrongers of previous generations". In my [college days](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3mRjydcPw), one would encounter the occasional Objectivist; the overall psychology seems comparable. Maybe being really into "hacker culture" (as defined by ESR's mutant version of the Jargon File) was a bridge from being really into Rand to ... wherever they are now.
ESR:
> Cities are literally burning. We are now past the point where trying to “unpolarize” does anything but give aid and comfort to the enemies of civilization.
> >There is no communist invasion force openly posturing to invade and occupy the United States.
> No. Instead we have a violent Communist insurgency within our borders. They are determined, murderous totalitarians who will shoot you for wearing a MAGA hat. And it is time to end them.
There are like 800 comments engaging this drivel.
In the history of philosophy, a “rationalist” is one who asserts the
superiority of a-priori deductive reasoning over grubby induction from
mere material facts. The opposing term is “empiricist”, and in fact
Yudkowskian-reform “rationalists” are, in strictly correct terminology,
skeptical empiricists.
Hey, whatever you need to tell yourself so you can sleep at night,
man….
lol. I feel you.
But nah. Herbert had his faults -- including a Siskindian (as long as we're coining these noxious terms) penchant for using 10 words where 2 would do. But he had a bit more sense than the Rationalists, and maybe even had their number:
> Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Quine, Willard Van Orman: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
looks like it is time for another most ambitious crossover in
history, with r/badphilosophy.
not that Quine was a lefty in any way (very much the opposite), but
the thought of any of these asshats claiming to be thinking at Quine’s
level is… ugh
couple of other gems on there too. Hayakawa, Bertrand Russell,
Orwell, Pirsig, et al. i can hear them screaming in the heavens
ESR broke his blog somehow last
year — the last real post was on 9/25/2020 — and you can’t even comment
there any more. So now he’s off to Less Wrong. Popcorn me, baby.
Oh man, and they said Avengers Endgame was the most ambitious
crossover in history. Clearly had no idea what would happen when two
internet personality cults get mushed together.
[deleted]
There was a time when ESR was taken very seriously.
Save us from what? iirc esr doesn’t believe in climate change (or whatever weasily way people nowadays say ‘well, the science isn’t as clear as I like so we shouldn’t do anything’).
E: and it isn’t just this, the whole ‘lets try to think more clearly’ is a project with no clear goals apart from that, and which has brings little success to their lives when they end up thinking more clearly. Esr has been doing this for 50 years apparently, and he has little to show for it (I mean just look at this post, once again, it is way too long).
E2: ow look his definition of new humans excludes people with adhd. Thats nice. (at least somebody in the comments improves on it so it isn’t this exclusionary, honestly nice work there lesswronger (the ‘I try to avoid places where im less rational’ thing, still weird, but if that is what you want to do fine)).
E3: not one piece of work referenced was published after 1995.
E4: Random shower thought from earlier. Considering how much the LW/Rationalist types love secret societies and secret groups, they prob never got why A Brave New World’s world was bad. They would have all loved to go to ‘thinkers island’. (Lot of the SF he likes also has people with psychic powers mascarading as science btw (at least the foundation series, and NUL-A are, I have never read gulf, as far as I can remember)).
For some reason I never really thought about EY as the next generation’s ESR, but it makes sense (right down to the libertarianism). Except ESR did, like, actually do some programming.
Also worth noting that he’s one of those libertarians whose actual outlook is indistinguishable from Pinochet-esque fascism http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8752#comment-2447381
Thanks I hate it
ESR:
Hey, whatever you need to tell yourself so you can sleep at night, man….
I made it to the second paragraph and hit this:
Then I threw up in my mouth a little bit, so I’m gonna need a break before I finish.
Quine, Willard Van Orman: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
looks like it is time for another most ambitious crossover in history, with r/badphilosophy.
not that Quine was a lefty in any way (very much the opposite), but the thought of any of these asshats claiming to be thinking at Quine’s level is… ugh
couple of other gems on there too. Hayakawa, Bertrand Russell, Orwell, Pirsig, et al. i can hear them screaming in the heavens
Not in my wildest nightmares I could come up with such a cursed crossover. I don’t think I have what it takes to read this in its entirety
Ha ha ha ha this is great.
ESR broke his blog somehow last year — the last real post was on 9/25/2020 — and you can’t even comment there any more. So now he’s off to Less Wrong. Popcorn me, baby.
Oh man, and they said Avengers Endgame was the most ambitious crossover in history. Clearly had no idea what would happen when two internet personality cults get mushed together.
“Gulf” changed his life? Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle, what a shallow human being.