@victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place
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victorgijsbers

@victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place

Philosopher (Leiden University) and interactive fiction writer; author of Turandot, The Baron and Kerkerkruip; Philosophy Videos @ http://bit.ly/2SFEtC2

#philosophy #InteractiveFiction #metaphysics #Kant #literature #EmilyDickinson #ttrpgs

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victorgijsbers, to random
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Religious claims would be far more believable if their adherents were doing the morally right things.

But usually, quite the opposite.

I know there are great and admirable religious thinkers, but it really feels as if every moral advance is opposed by the established religions, and usually in the most stupid way imaginable.

Which proves that God does not exist?

victorgijsbers, to random
@victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Pythagorea is a weird Android (perhaps also iOs) game about geometry, where you have to make semi-Euclidean constructions: you have an unmarked ruler but not a compass, and you're limited to a finite space, but you do get grid points and lines for free. Some puzzles are tedious, but I like it overall. And the constructions can get involved. (I'm still unsure why the inner circle of the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle had radius 1.)

victorgijsbers, to random
@victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

So I was looking for a free proxy server for very incidental use. (Obviously this has nothing to do with Dutch ISPs having just now blocked a well-known website full of academic content that is hard to get at through university libraries.) A site like croxyproxy seems to work. But I'm wondering... should I be concerned about safety, privacy, anything like that? Is there a reason to not trust free proxy servers?

SJohnRoss, to random
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    victorgijsbers,
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    @SJohnRoss In Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny apparently came up with a sci-fi version of the Shan people of South East Asia and an epileptic ruler just so he could write the sentence: "And then the fit hit the Shan."

    It's hard for me to imagine that your intentions are lower. 😂

    victorgijsbers, to random
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    I'm reading a book about a boy who has magic powers and goes to a special school for wizards where everything is not what it seems and... yes of course the book is A Wizard of Earthsea, why do you ask?

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    A Taco Bell has opened near to my house. These are very rare in the Netherlands, and I've never been to one.

    Is it a place where you can eat okay Mexican food? Or is it a Tex-Mex styled McDonald's that should be avoided at all costs?

    jmac, to VideoGames
    @jmac@masto.nyc avatar

    A thing about #VideoGames I think of now and again:

    I am anticipating a possible middle-future cultural phenomenon where a ton of people, starting with #GenX-ers, express that they love video games and want to play more but they're getting too old for them. That is, their eyesight and reflexes and so on begin to drop below the threshold to enjoy them, en masse.

    This hasn't been a problem with other mass-cultural media before, right? You generally don't get too old for books or movies and such.

    victorgijsbers,
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    @jmac Though this only applies to fairly specific genres, right?

    DominikDammer, to random
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    i love how this philosophy bot never boosts my philosophy posts but all other. thanks for your service buddy @icymi_philosophy

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @philippsteinkrueger @DominikDammer @icymi_philosophy Philosophy is so dead here that Stephen Hawking joined the Fediverse just to celebrate! 👊

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then I contradict myself,
    (I am large, I contain 45 terabytes of training data.)

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Am I the only one who believes that social media posts starting with the phrase 'am I the only one' betray a narcissistic obsession with one's own uniqueness?

    ninokadic, to philosophy
    @ninokadic@mastodon.social avatar

    Am I the only one who unequivocally thinks that philosophy has made progress? Perhaps I have a different definition of what progress means, but surely I can't be the only one?

    The number of theories and arguments that philosophers uncovered, as well as the clarity and breadth of their analyses, is certainly progress.

    @philosophy @academicchatter

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @ninokadic I want to say, yes there has been progress; but then I want to immediately add a large 'but'. One of the ways in which philosophy differs from the physical sciences is that we always have to rediscover or history. So for instance, I think Kant's metaphysics is more interesting and better than almost everything being done by contemporary analytic metaphysicians... but, you can improve on Kant by knowing this contemporary metaphysics, which is better in other ways.

    victorgijsbers,
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    @ninokadic I think what I mean is: there's often progress and regress at the same time. Logical positivism? In some ways it's better than what came before, in some ways it's worse, but we can learn something from both its advantages and disadvantages.

    Metaphysics in the Lewis/Sider/Williamson vein? I think it's misguided in fundamental ways, but it's certainly sharpened some of our ideas.

    And so on.

    victorgijsbers,
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    @DominikDammer @ninokadic @SteveCooke So there has clearly been progress in the political and ethical values we hold. At the very least this progress has informed philosophy. But I think it should only be called 'philosophical progress' if the progress has been due to philosophy. And although I think it probably partially is, this is of course a complicated historical question. So I don't think these examples are clear cut!

    ninokadic, to philosophy
    @ninokadic@mastodon.social avatar

    Analytic philosophy:
    We can benefit science, trust us, we matter… 😞

    Continental philosophy:
    Science yet fails to rise – sich erheben – to the level of philosophy 😎

    @philosophy

    victorgijsbers,
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    @ninokadic @philosophy Analytic philosopher: I'm thinking!

    Continental philosopher: I'm thought thinking itself!

    victorgijsbers, to random
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    The most surprising bit of feedback I got on my History of Modern Philosophy course was: "The teacher didn't use Powerpoints, so how was I supposed to learn for the exam?"

    I have a hard time wrapping my head around this.

    Migueldeicaza, to random
    @Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social avatar

    How @molly0xfff migrated from substack to ghost:

    https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghost/

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @molly0xfff @morecowbell @Migueldeicaza i think the appropriate Ghost lyrics here are:

    "Her pact with Satan
    Her despisal of mankind
    Her acts of cruelty and her lust for blood
    Makes her one of us"

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    A question about programming terminology. See the Python shell below. This behaviour is perfectly reasonable. But it would also be perfectly reasonable for a programming language to work in a different way, namely such that the final result would be 18. Are there languages that work that way? Is there a name for it?

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    Five minutes into recording a video about knowledge in which I was using the example "Lagos is the capital of Nigeria" as something I knew, I suddenly realised that Lagos is not the capital of Nigeria.

    Restart.

    Faintdreams, to random
    @Faintdreams@dice.camp avatar

    Who is your favourite living Philosopher?

    I'm looking for new non fiction to read.

    Would prefer Non white and non Male but appreciate it's a narrow field full of White men ...🤔

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @SJohnRoss @Faintdreams Rather than it being a narrow field, I tend to think of it as an extremely broad field, ranging over topics like ethics, politics, logic, science, art, and once we add the historians of philosophy and the different works traditions, it becomes even broader. 😃 Are there any topics you're interested in specifically? And do you have any background knowledge in philosophy?

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    These days, whenever the 5yo falls ill with a fever she picked up at school, I also fall ill; and, what's worse, every single time it takes me not the three days or so that seem normal to me, but a full week or more of fever symptoms before I recover. Is this normal? Am I just getting old? Has COVID harmed my immune system?

    It's certainly irritating. 🙄

    victorgijsbers, to leuven
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    The reputation of Americans as entitled know-nothing tourists is largely undeserved... but I just read a hotel review written by an American woman who was incensed, INCENSED, that people in the Flemish city of did not answer her in French and had not had the common courtesy of putting up French language signs and printing restaurant menus in French.

    "You may as well be in The Netherlands. [...] Tip: Avoid the Flemish region of Belgium."

    🤣

    victorgijsbers, to random
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    The kids were guessing the ingredients of my stroganoff sauce.

    Thinking about salt, I gave them a hint: "It's very small, you can't see it, but it's present in almost all food."

    Said the 7yo: "Microplastics!"

    ds, to random
    @ds@wetdry.world avatar

    what subgenre of image is this

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @ds It's 200 years late for a Descartridge.

    GramrgednAngel, to languagelearning
    @GramrgednAngel@zirk.us avatar

    https://youtu.be/FrsD78hHGtI?si=FtddCSpkqL0vKxsV

    My colleague @sesquiotic tells us how to pronounce "Turandot"

    I shan't tell you why I had to look for this, because it doesn't matter.







    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @SJohnRoss I haven't been editing it lately, so if you found a typo, let me know!

    victorgijsbers,
    @victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    @SJohnRoss That's so gratifying to hear! 😍 Incidentally, exactly the same thing (though at a slightly earlier time in the night) happened to Chandler Groover:

    https://intfiction.org/t/turandot/42800

    I'm sure the prize/price error is just an error! In Dutch, it's the exact same word, and somehow this makes it harder to get it right in English. (Whereas I'd never make the affect/effect mistake, because in Dutch they have different pronunciations.)

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