Thursday 17 January 2019

A Review of the Gloomspite Gitz Battletome for Age of Sigmar

(I haven’t forgotten about that list of things I would do for December, I will still do them. But I was reading this and wanted to talk about it.)




Haven't played AoS, have read the 2nd edition book and a handful of other things so that is my only real point of comparison, as well as stuff I have randomly run into online.

Anyway, far from an expert appraisal.

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The cover is fun, but not exceptional.

Games Workshop - credit your artists.

Printed end papers have a moody B&W version of an interior piece.

The title page before the contents has one of the best art pieces in the book and whoever did this is fucking amazing. I think they also did the marginalia inside, which is also great.

I'm keeping this small so I don't get sued, but its very good.


So this is an army with a bunch of not-that related factions and races in it;

"Well might their enemies wonder what could unite such anarchic beings into an army capable of conquest and slaughter on a grand scale. For the answer, one need only look to the darkest corner of the heavens."

That darkest corner being the Games Workshop Project Development Meeting Room;

A - "We need to re-do Night Goblins for AoS."

B - "Yeah! Fanatics! Mushrooms! Hoods!"

A - "Oh and we need to re-do those spider riding goblins at the same time."

B - "Ehhhh, they don't sell enough to be worth it."

A - "Yeah but I still kinda like them though, even though the models are old. Plus we need to keep selling the Arachnorok."

B - "Shall we just lump them in together?"

It's not really quite that bad. They are following a MOON. And most of you will know I am a terminal lunaphile. Most of the models do end up with aesthetic and perceptual unity but the Spiderfang Grots are a little bit of a red-headed stepchild in this book. They tend to creep in at the end when everything else has been considered.

Ok onto the interior.




THE WRITING

- Necroquake is still a terrible word.

Here are some words and phrases I did actually like;

- "Danksome destruction"

- "Heralds of the Everdank"

- "To the Gloomspite hordes, the realms will only be returned to their proper state when the Bad Moon waxes fat on high, and all the lands lie draped in pale shadow beneath it...."

- "Grots seized by the Gloomspite feel their minds spinning with mean-spirited schemes and ambitions of 'teachin' da surface gitz a lesson'. Shadows crawl and churn around them like teeming insects, and strange fungi sprout spontaneously before spewing hallucinogenic spores." - This is almost literally my D&D players, and player characters. And me.

- "Loonstone, madrock, loonystone and badstone."

- "Of course such charms nearly always backfire; the bearer is forever thinking devious thoughts of their own, leading to their loonstone pendants glowing constantly and driving them into the depths of frantic paranoia." - Also my D&D players. And me.

- "The Evercrawl"

- "Trog Holes"

- "Skrappa Spill"

- "Glowey Morkeyes"

- "Gangle-legged git grabbers"

- "Boingob - Godbeast father of Squigs"

- "Loontales"

- A sub-heading on 'Bottlethieves' about the mass theft of alembics.

- "Unstoppable Idiocy"

- "Loonwar" (about two moons fighting in the sky)

- "Driven to sate their hedonistic desires, the Slannesh worshippers fall upon the mushrooms and are plunged into a state of psychedelic bliss. Yet as the Bad moon rises over the vale, their euphoria turns to nightmares."

- "The Badsnatchers"

- "The Coast of Dullards"

- "The Infamous Overbounder"

- "Sneaky Snufflers"

I like both the prose and conceptualising in this a lot more than in most of the other AoS stuff I have read. There could be a few reasons for that.

Gobbos are allowed to be a little bit silly and throughout the book there is just the slightest edge of it almost making fun of the more serious aspects of the setting. The "Everdank" being one. This works because it fits the mindset of the Grots, it probably wouldn't work the same way for a more 'serious' race.

The Edge of Ridiculousness, or just growing familiarity and ability with the form they have chosen, allows the UNCREDITED writer(s?) to combine standard, rather starchy (and to me, rather meat and potatoes; 'Necroquake', 'FyreSlayers') Age of Trademark language in a way that opens up some of the more interesting phonetic possibilities producing this sense of rather fecund liveliness and mania which feels more like Lewis Carrol rather than the home of the Stormcast Eternals.

It might just be that they got better at it, or put better people on this one. Or maybe all the AoS battletomes are this good, I haven't read them.



THE ARTWORK

There are two great kinds of art in this, the marginalia and the miniature photography.

Hopefully I won't get sued, I will try to keep images small to give you the general idea;

The main marginalia is this lovely dual pair of fungal pillars with smiling and frowning Bad Moon faces.




It shifts to more sparse margins for the highly referenced pages, but all the little details and elements are still lovely and very well done.

There are also many lively little fragments and drop-ins of art and text which work well, more on those below.



The mini photography alone is a multi-stage art;

> Conceptualising and designing and producing minis.
> Painting the minis by the worlds best mini painters.
> Arranging them in dioramas.
> Photographing this in a professional cinematic style.



So thousands upon thousands of hours of different kinds of talent have gone into each of these battle or display photos. You could write a book about each of these just individually and here they are being carried off together to a level as high as its ever been.

(None of these are credited.)

The 'art' art, the stuff you would consider the 'primary' art, like the two page spreads and the portraits of things represented by the minis in the imagined world, are consistently ok. This is definitely something a skilled person worked on and completed on schedule.

Pages 6 - 7 Squigs fight Stormcast.



Look, any time Squigs fight anything its mildly funny. It can't not be funny. They make any image better. Just the idea of a lightning powered superhero chaos basher being bitten in half by a fucking tooth fungus meatball thing is fucking great.

Again, squigs make everything good;





THE LAYOUT

The fundamental skeleton is the same basic competence as usual (generally better than RPG design or more utility at least, but perhaps also facing less complex challenges)

GW haven't taken any giant leaps conceptually but they do deserve recognition for bringing those elements to the best possible quality and using them in the best possible way given the pre-existing format

Marginalia - magnificent and employed with correct intensity relative to page contents.

Drop-in fragments - colourful, fun and appropriate in a meta-context - the Gitz culture is meant to have a bricolage of life and lively fungification and wiggly things crawling up everywhere, its meant to feel a little dirty.

These are also charming pieces of world-building.


Digital cruft - this is kept under control, and, as with the fungal drop-ins, appropriate to the context of the piece. It's meant to feel a little dirty.

A little example of the page-dirt. Unlike 90 % of books where this is used, here it feels alrgiht.

It's also dialled back on the reference pages so they keep that Tufte-ian clarity.

B&W fade-ins - not sure what to think about these, they are... not terrible? They do not make me want to kill or murder anyone and they seem a reasonable solution to the problem of referability in the rules and stat based  pages.



The balance of 'noise' relating to the referability of pages is good and well thought through, the less often you will need to read something in play, the more page noise there is, the more often you need to read it, the noise is brought down to a minimum and just provides visual texture, but is still well employed when it exists.




THE MINIATURES

Really beautiful and look exactly like something from a dark childhood story. (Said that above, still true.)

The modern aesthetic is very slightly overpowered for my 90's tastes, with always a little too much detail.  It's animated, ridiculous, fun. If you measure only by *skill*, new mangler squigs and squig herds (I was imagining a squig-only army, now possible for the fist time)  are probably better. They have gained something but also lost something.

Too much in-form animation? They are more like frozen images now. The island of time each figure occupies is narrower. Compare the feel of main troops to new models. Old models seem 'boring' in some ways but *still*, *repeatable*, not busy or visually morphologically frantic. There to receive meaning, not impose it. They feel more general, less specific.

If re-done today, they would be full of individual energy and specific locked stances and lots of fun bits, but also busy, striking, frantic, anxious. A Hollywood producer feel, or social medial feel or marvel-movie whedoning feel. We cannot leave the audience to have their own emotions/responses - that is not what they are paying for. They have to be prodded - "see, it's a *GOBLIN*".

I'm being a little harsh on the models and that's probably because I am an old man with old tastes. They are works of art and very beautiful. I actually bought minis based on this book, which rarely happens.



A Note on Diorama photography

Diorama photography is the primary artistic vector of the book and communication of the model as action portrait is the main way they are perceived.

NOT as playing pieces, tessellated forms or 'toys' meant to be grasped. Even the smallest models form and generate their own highly particular world around them.



A Note on Morphic Tessellation

Models used to be played with in ranks. Some were designed with repeating and interlocking patterns that show up in a particular way in a block of troops. In particular what come to mind is the Witch Elves with their flow of hair and dynamic dancing bodies, and the Chaos warriors and the repeated 'negative' spaces on their shields in ranks (these especially look like they still want to be in ranks).

This is not as prevalent in grots but the main line troops still use the old sculpts. It would show up harder with the spear-carrying grots as they looked cool in  block but as more jumbled individuals would look odd. But they are on the cellar-relative list, still on the army list but made to stay out of the group photos, or kept at the back with spider-riders, loonboss in a squig and fellwater troggoths. Maybe because GW thinks the models don't quite work, or maybe to emphasise the New Hotness?

There is a kind of war of silence or hunger for stillness between millennial models and gen x models. When you see them together, they are living in very-slightly different aesthetics of time and sensation.

In modern GW, characters have stillness allowed to them, they are allowed to be perceived as if moving slowly or not at all, but the commoner models aren't allowed that as much I think. The masses must be seen to move.



THE RULES

Not an expert. Never played it. Seems exactly as complex as before, just in a different way.

I have the nagging feeling, common with modern GW rulsets that I am missing something in an unbought book, or generals handbook somewhere, that everyone else knows about.

It looks like a proper bitch to put together what I would consider a 'normal' game. In the old days, if it was in the book you could run it. Now there are grand alliances, keyword cultures, allies, battalions which you pay points for. I only read through the rules a long time ago - but it seems that the complexity has been displaced onto a series of command or bonus bubbles.

From this it feels like the game would be mostly about finding ways to intelligently stack relatively minor but compiling bonuses of just different enough quality that you can use them together but similar enough that they can work together to a particular goal.

The stats themselves are relatively simple but the escalating conditional special rules seem like they would be mind-wrecking and seems like the divide between medium and good players would be mastery of this capacious, point-based and ever-evolving meta-currency and para-economy of mild rules alterations.

I don't like the idea of this.

I haven't played it though so I don't really know.



THOUGHTS

CREDIT YOUR FUCKING CREATORS

- Writers
- Rules Writers
- Model Designers
- Model Painters
- Photographers
- Diorama People
- Scenery Builders
- Whoever else

I realise this is a group effort, but so are films and computer games and they fucking manage it.


Cut lose your artists for the big scenes and mini-character shots. I mean, cut them loose as in allow them more freedom, not fire them.

You really don't need a 'house style' for this as the minis, rules, layouts, margins and everything else provides it. Maybe change the management structure around the from "Ok, who's getting the Gargant picture" to "Ok, who has any freaky image ideas for stuff from the Gloomspite battletome."

Also a laxening of the 'house style' means you could include images from your substantial library, may of which are very good.

Since these pictures are not the primary way people relate to the minis, you can relax the informational stranglehold and do stranger stuff and hopefully get better art.

Otherwise, well done.

This isn't High Art like Realms of Chaos, but its a respectable and worthwhile piece of industrial art. No-one involved with this should feel ashamed of themselves and if that sounds like mild praise then remember how much I fucking hate corporations and look at my shit personality matrix, I hate everything.




And Credit Your Creators.



MINOR PARACOSM WORRIES

There have top be some awkward discussions between Chaos dudes who are smashing stuff for Deep Spiritual Reasons and Green dudes who are smashing stuff to smash stuff.

Chaos is Evilll, and also Random.

The Bad Moon is Random, but also evil.

I'm imagining complex exchanges between Sigmars buff sorcerers in the magic gymnasium;

"The Bad Moon! It's actions are completely chaotic!"

"Wait, do you mean spiritually entropic and dedecated to the reality-eating demon gods?"

"Well, no... More just roulette table chaotic, plus fungus."

"Like Nurgles fungus of plaaaague?"

"Not quite like that no."

"Like Arielles overflowing fungus of liiiife?"

"More like a Jim Henson vibe.. but still Evil, or at least Very Bad."

Behold the Grand Alliances of Good, Evil, Dead and Very Bad.

35 comments:

  1. That second image looks Blanche-inspired, if it's not Blanche himself.

    There's a piece in Silver Tower that looks a bit similar in style and may be the same artist. I will try to track it down.

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  2. Your assessment of the AoS rules are on the mark. Remove "mind-wrecking" and a lot of competitive players would nod approvingly of that as a summary, for better or worse.

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  3. I've generally seen the 4 grand alliances as 'good', 'edgy' 'dead' and 'wacky'.

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  4. Also this book is the first thing GW has really put out in a long time that's had me want to really get back into their flagship games.

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  5. I think a lot of it has to do with your personal approach to their games. Are you a competitive/tournament player, or a dice tossing chip eating have fun gamer? Unless the army has game breaking features, they don't appeal to the main purchaser of their games, the competitive sort who wants to win every game and never lose. The more casual player seems to be the one the fringe armies are made for. For me, the Gloomspite & Nighthaunt (check those models out, moooody!) are my two faves out of the new range and I am purely a modeler and haven't tossed a die in their games in years.

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    1. I've always thought that GW battle games are much more about mashing two armies together and seeing what kind of fun and weird stuff happens rather than an actual genuine tabletop wargame. Who wins or loses isn't really important.

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  6. What you write about the rules is spot on. AOS (like WH40K) is a game of armylist building, more than actual tabletop tactics.

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  7. I wonder if one day soon you'll get poached by GW and bring a much needed cerebral boost to the ranks of uncredited GW creators.

    Also, the fecund liveliness of language presented here has shifted significantly since last I was paying attention and lends an odour of pumpkin spice to compounds I've coined. If they relinquished their attachment to the use of the letter z I might be less appalled but it remains, appended, to remind us that there once was a year called 1983. I hate that z.

    It is almost with relief that I call a retreat from the now increasingly hackneyed ironical use of fantasy compounds. It always reminded me of Liartown's Malediction Prophecy posts; https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/499899627365454957/

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    1. I doubt I'd survive a week at GW. One barnstorming argument about how Ogres wouldn't act that way, or about how a skeleton _feels_, and I'd be out.

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    2. They feel kinda bony.

      The crucial pointto consider with skeletons is this: In order to fight on the battlefield and wield the same sorts of weapons humans wield they need to have strength comparable to that of humans. They weigh about a sixth as much as a human. How fast can they run? How high can they leap? Are they like shrieking bony grasshoppers of shrieking bony doom? Capable of and thematically suited to forming castells of scale and complexity comparable to driver ant bivouacs? Almost certainly yes. GW needs to amend all reference to skeletons to include these undeniable facts.

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  8. As always, your thoughts on minis and mini gaming are astute and enlightening. Has there ever been a time that you were totally oblivious on what GW was doing?

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    1. I think from about the age of 15 to 27 maybe.

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    2. Ah okay, you mean you knew about Warhammer before the age of 15 as well? But anyway, I think I wanted to ask if you've found their work consistently fascinating, or if their dominant position on the market makes for a consistent pull on the interest of British gamers.

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    3. I think my first awareness of Warhammer was early in secondary school where someone had a White Dwarf and let me read it on the bus. The older brother of a neighbour had a stack of them, which seemed utterly ancient to me, and let me read through them. It would have been maybe around 13?

      With the second thing, its a combination of the two. They have just always been a part of my life and a defining feature of my friend group/personality type. Both I would have to say.

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    4. I was recently pondering why I find GW work fascinating myself. I mean, I can tell a fair bit about what's good about it, in conception and execution, but I am not sure what I find of myself in it.

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    5. Finding yourself in things you like is an unusual idea to me, I don't think I've ever thought about it that way.

      My best guess would be;

      Object orientation.
      World Building or modelling imaginary worlds.
      Competition.
      Craft, kleinplastik or working on small things.

      That gets you all the way down the classic male interest tree of being into objects, being into imaginary worlds, liking competing with your friends.

      Just the competition with objects is most wargames. less competition and no objects is most RPGs (though a lot of Warhammer nerds are also into RPGs).

      Then you have stuff for people with a high internal emotional volume, like the high gothic and extreme drama feeds into that, (as opposed to a 'flatter' imagined world).

      Then the combination of being a legacy company and using that to maintain a v high level of quality. So GW was first on the scene with a lot of things, and got a lead on everyone else, which they have largely maintained, meaning they usually have the best models and even if they don't they have a sensed and remembered history of usually having the best models which means they have real-estate in all the fans heads and are given preferential 'first thought' treatment by anyone who has been a fan since interacting with them isn't just doing something you like now by also linking up with your personal history of it.

      TLDR; its probably pressing a bunch of buttons in your head, many of which are a combination of a specific personality sub-set and cultural expression (though that's a bit of a truism for anything cultural).

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    6. As a point of comparison, consider this world of almost-exclusively-slavic women carefully making exquisite unique sad-but-beautiful display dolls

      https://www.instagram.com/marinabychkova/

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    7. That was very on point, thanks. I suppose I am mesmerised by Warhammer, rather than fascinated by it. ( I don't know how distinctive are the two concepts). The Slavic dolls are intriguing. I find it easier to approach from a 'high' art perspective (mannequins and all that) rather than from a toy one. I suppose if I had grown up playing with these sorts of dolls that might be different. Thanks for the discussion, Patrick, that was helpful to me.

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  9. Which big 5 questionnaire did you take? Was it the sapa dash project dot org one?

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    1. Actually a friend just found it for me; it's the 538 one. (Should have been obvious from the comparison in the figure.) I'd suggest taking the sapa project one. It has a much greater population of responses for norming against and is run by actual personality psychologists. The 538 one doesn't seem to have much discrimination at the high end of at least several of the dimensions. I also got 100 on openness. And 96 on extra, which is highly implausible.

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    2. Still pretty bad https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-e-HMdmlZ5eGTF8mG9QkxxihKPzQYxQe basically I am a trash person.

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    3. Nah most traits involve tradeoffs. You can't win or lose these tests. All you can do is get more information about yourself, which can help you plan future endeavors with greater likelihood of effectiveness.

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    4. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing a positive rationalist with high extroversion, high openness and low neuroticism might say.

      Thinking you can't fail a personality test is like saying you can't fail at life, when the results of those failures are all around us. It pushes 'positive framing' to the point of delusion.

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    5. I am undeniably an optimist, but I'd contest the rationalist label.

      (Apologies in advance for the discharge of working memory that follows, but this was on my mind for unrelated reasons, and it is relevant, so here you go.)

      Of course one can fail at particular things, sometimes dramatically, and sometimes to the degree where the failure is arguably failing at life (such as the unambiguous case of being responsible for a mistake that directly leads to death).

      Most failures, however, are just as much an exercise in the narrowing of horizons as they are in any facts. Consider the case below.

      Person A plays five games in sequence, with results lose, lose, lose, win, and then lose. Is the person a winner or a loser? If you focus on averages, or on misses, the person is a loser. If you focus on hits the person is a winner. Limiting horizon to the individual game forces a negative interpretation in four out of five iterations, but that limitation is an arbitrary choice of focus. (Incidentally, this is a general framework which can fit many different kinds of choice or valuation dilemmas, including exploratory behavior, self control, investment, and mating strategy.)

      In general, people can't actually be winners or losers, they can only take actions that are wins and losses. Interpretation of the sequence of facts lies entirely in the imagination (both individual and consensual), the same place where goals, money, promises, and other such things live.

      The personality determinist might take the recursive rhetorical step and argue that personality itself determines how people construe the horizon and whether within that horizon they focus on hits or misses. The personality determinist is right (there are individual difference measures of risk tolerance, prevention focus, and so forth), but only when looking at the behavior of aggregates (not of individuals).

      Stable intrapsychic personality traits (the things that you think of as inside your head, traits such as intellect or impulsivity, to which tests like this assign scores) actually can't cause anything within an individual. This can be difficult to accept at first, but is relatively easy to prove analytically. By hypothesis, a stable trait doesn't change. Restating, that means the trait has no variation. Something lacking variation cannot be a cause, because causation involves change in A leading to change in B. If A never changes, it is incoherent (meaningless, actually) to talk about a potential causal relationship originating in A. So if a trait is stable within you it cannot cause anything individually.

      This doesn't say anything for or against a reasoned (or thoughtless) pessimistic outlook, but you can't blame such an outlook on your personality, because the relevant concepts won't bear the weight. The responsibility lies elsewhere.

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    6. Hmm, I think I still disagree but you got me so deep in your damned logic box that I will have to think about how.

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    7. "Thinking you can't fail a personality test is like saying you can't fail at life, "

      ... If you believe these Personality Tests are truthful and complete. I wouldn't even add 'accurate' to a Test's validity, you just have to consider the unjustifiable precision of the Big Five Test based on self-reporting(!!)

      These tests are designed to be useful in clumping large populations into crude groups so corporations or governments can get a handle on them. They have no value at the individual level IMO. Think of how many institutions fell for the Myers-Briggs Test which is discredited now (at least by those pushing The Big Five Test). The Myers-Briggs gives every type a glowing happy feeling reading the description of their virtues. This is where I agree with you a truthful and complete Personality Test would describe the world as it is, filled with sinners, degenerates and idiots. The results would be painful reading for most of us, so they don't exist being bad for the business.

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    8. Businesses are neither the primary creators nor the primary users of personality tests, so what is good for them has little impact on what tests do and do not exist. (The main factor is what reputable academic journals will publish and to a lesser degree how various institutional funding bodies award grants.)

      Like all measurement instruments, personality tests vary in quality, involve measurement error, and have other idiosyncratic limitations. Self-report alone can bias results in various ways, but self-report is hardly the fatal flaw that many (mostly people without psychometric training) make it out to be. The biases can be handled in a number of ways and in any case the ultimate validity of any test can be established in a number of independent ways.

      Also, it is worth keeping in mind that psychological measures of stable personality traits are only one class of psychological measures. There is a lot more going on in people's heads than just stable traits.

      Skeptical cynicism can be just as lazy as credulity.

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    9. Necropraxis, I believe these tests are junk science when used by an individual to learn about himself and don't see any point discussing it with you since your opinion is so far from mine.

      I wanted to emphasize to P.S. that these tests which are designed through analysis of mass populations are useful only to organize thinking about mass populations and their subgroups.

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    10. Prometheus, I think I have failed to make myself clear. Probably my fault. I agree with you about individuals and aggregation, as I wrote above:

      The personality determinist is right ... but only when looking at the behavior of aggregates (not of individuals).

      I was trying to communicate that your first comment was additionally throwing out a lot of babies with that bathwater. Why throw away tools that are good for something just because they have shortcomings (self-report, etc.)? Better to learn what the limitations mean.

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    11. Bredndan, in response to your comment beginning "I am undeniably an optimist,"

      I don't think your analysis makes any sense in any real life actually-existing situation.

      "In general, people can't actually be winners or losers, they can only take actions that are wins and losses." - That's only possibly true in a lab or the mind of a logician. In reality everyone who has ever lived was bound into specific circumstances and faced a life of limited time and resources, which ended at a particular time.

      Are you going to go to someone, for instance, dying of cancer at the age of 35, a virgin, poor, with rock bottom self esteem and no friends, and say; "In general, people can't actually be winners or losers, they can only take actions that are wins and losses."

      You would sound insane. It's like telling leper in medieval europe that they only feel like a monster because society despises them and parts are dropping off, or telling a jew hiding from nazis that their absolute terror and despair is 'an arbitrary choice of focus' because up till now, life was pretty ok, and if they survive it might get better.

      I think probably there are few or no arbitrary choices of focus in life as it is lived.

      And saying stable traits can't 'cause' things sounds like another elaborate get-out that doesn't make any sense in life as it is actually lived. What causes meteorites to smash into the ground. Gravity. But its a stable trait. Where is the unstable trait. There aren't any, all the physical events proceed from universal laws. So there are no causes.

      "I feel depressed."

      "Well you have high neuroticism and are relatively anti-social, the combination of these strongly suggests you will be spending a lot of time lonely and miserable."

      "Ah, so they are causing my misery."

      "No, they are just... things. Things that are. They don't cause anything. The cause of you being miserable is that you don't go out and make friends and you think about your inner problems a lot."

      "So why do I do that?"

      "Well you... choose to? And its driven by your personality? But your personality isn't technically a 'cause', it just sets strong limits on what will actually happen with your life."

      This sounds nuts to me.

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    12. Patrick, why do you equate misery with failure? Anything challenging, and life in general, is going to entail suffering.

      I think you may be considering traits of personal relevance, and then assuming that your experience overrules generalized knowledge.

      It may help to consider an example with less direct personal relevance. Imagine an epileptic who experiences a seizure when perceiving certain visual patterns. This involves some stable aspect of makeup, either biological or psychological. It is a trait that varies between, rather than within, people. It should be obvious, both to deliberation and common sense, that the internal configuration of this epileptic alone does not cause seizures any more than the visual pattern alone causes seizures. You see the pattern, and nothing happens. The effect is interactive, and it is the variation of the internal and external aspects together which determines the variation in outcome. Taking a test to learn about this epileptic susceptibility would be adaptive for individuals. They could then take steps to avoid the pattern.

      Does this condition make the epileptic's life less convenient in some ways compared to someone without the same builtin feature of existence? Sure. Life's not fair.

      Now imagine two epileptics with the exact same condition. They can make different life choices, and also use different frameworks to make sense of their experiences. They can set the horizons of their focus in different ways, approach different situations, and adopt different reference levels.

      The same is true for any stable trait.

      This assumes that the trait itself actually reflects some true aspect of reality, rather than being the imaginative fancy of some intellectual (such as, perhaps, the Myers-Briggs example above). But if the trait lacks actual existence, that means people have more, rather than less, freedom (though perhaps less knowledge with which to make informed, adaptive choices about the future, for those holding beliefs about the false entity).

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    13. I am still thinking about this.

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  10. Here's an idea... let's keep changing the software so they have to update the hardware. We can sell more miniatures that way...

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  11. I wonder when GW stopped crediting writers–and why.

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    1. 1D4 chan is convinced it was the terrible reaction to the Matt Ward Space Marine codex and specific hatred of certain writers from the fans that did it.

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