Witches and Ray-Guns

That’s Not Entirely Suitable for Work. There’s not really much on show….

It’s new DH time once again, and that means I wanted a new wallpaper for my rendering machine, and Stonemason just put out this awesome scene model, and Nava was just asking to be dropped into it. You should be able to download the image by clicking above. It would be too dark for a book cover, but for a screen backdrop, it’s fine.

Oh, this image has absolutely nothing to do with the story I’m writing. You will not be reading about Nava (or anyone else) walking naked in a jungle river. She might hurt me if I did that to her.

Disclaimer: This isn’t really about 3 Body Problem because I haven’t seen the Netflix series or read the book. This is, if anything, about The Dark Forest (second in the trilogy, which I haven’t read either. So, it’s not really about that either. I’m not into criticising something I haven’t read. Oh, this is a bit of a long rant. Feel free to not read it. 🙂

Given what I wrote above, I should clarify. What I have a problem with is the so-called Dark Forest Theory as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. I won’t be assuming that makes any sense to anyone, though I suspect you may have a clue about the Fermi Paradox at least if you read my books. The Fermi Paradox is fairly simple: if alien life is common in the universe, why haven’t we seen it? Various solutions exist, almost all of them being horribly depressing. The Dark Forest Theory adds a bit of existential horror to the mix. It says that any civilisation which pokes its head out (sends signals from its planet which can be detected in another system) is immediately destroyed. That means that any civilisation which does exist is either keeping very quiet, or has been nuked into oblivion by now. Thus, the last thing we should be doing is making noise. If we do, we’re toast. The name comes from Liu Cixin’s second novel, where this theory is explored in some detail (I believe), but the basics behind it have been around a lot longer. Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker books have ancient war machines roaming the galaxy looking for developing civilisations to destroy, for example.

The Dark Forest Theory is based on game theory. Take two worlds, A and B. Assume that both have the means to destroy the other using some sort of high-tech, planet-busting weapon. A makes noise and B detects it. Now B has some options. Make contact with A. Stay silent. Destroy A. If they make contact, A may decide to destroy B: B has lost (everything). If they stay silent, A may eventually find them and then may destroy them, so they lose. The only sensible option is to immediately destroy A making them no longer a threat. A cold, hard assessment of how things could play out suggests that any reasonable civilisation should stay silent and blast anyone they discover. Hence, the silent universe we see. It all sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

Except…

Except that this is basically Pascal’s Wager for sci-fi. Blaise Pascal came up with his wager to explain why you should believe in God. It goes like this (well, not quite, but here’s the basic idea): If God exists, not believing in him will result in infinite punishment (an eternity in Hell), where believing in him grants infinite reward (Heaven). If God doesn’t exist, believing in him results in minimal loss (a bit of time and money). You can’t begin to compare infinity to anything with a real number, no matter how big, so it makes logical sense to believe in God just in case he does exist. If you don’t and he’s real, you’re in for an eternity of pain. I hope you can see where this is reflected in Dark Forest Theory. It’s the ‘you lose everything,’ infinite punishment thing. It’s common to this kind of thing.

There’s also Roko’s Basilisk, an existential horror thing which came out of Reddit. Suppose there will, at some point, come to pass a super-AI which will be of great benefit to mankind. It is of such benefit, in fact, that it thinks that anyone who fails to ensure that it comes into existence should be punished, forever. (Then we add the existential horror thing: It won’t punish people who don’t know about it, so it’s only now that you’ve heard about it that you’re in danger. You’re welcome.) Of course, this AI is only a hypothetical, so you’re free not to believe in it, but can you risk it? No, you just have to start working to make it exist for fear of infinite punishment.

All of these fall foul of what’s called the Black and White Fallacy. All of them assume that the situation is black and white, there are only two possible outcomes. They ignore third parties. Pascal ignores other gods. Roko ignores other AIs. Dark Forest assumes two players in the game. In reality, if you believe in God, you are ignoring other gods who may exist and may not be pleased with you for worshipping that one tribal war god. (Also, Pascal assumes God is a superficial idiot. If I were God, people persuaded by this argument would be the first ones in the Pit.) Roko ignores all the other potential super-AIs who also want to be created. (Roko’s Basilisk is an obvious Pascal clone, and not even a very good one. How this caused such a stir on Reddit, I do not know. If you want to know more, Wikipedia is your friend.) Dark Forest ignores other civilisations…

If someone else is watching, and B attacks A, it’s likely that B just gave themselves away to other, sneakier aliens. B is toast. B loses. This is where the Berserker idea makes way more sense. If you really want this to work, you send out probes to find potential threats and destroy them. Do it quietly enough, keep your head down, and you can stay alive while everyone else perishes. But, if you’re being really sensible, you can’t leave it at that because someone might find you. In the original Dark Forest idea and the Berserker one, the only way to really win is to colonise as much of the universe as you can. Go fast and go far. Make sure that the destruction of any one planet or system can’t destroy your species. Killing anyone else you find is just a side benefit. But, of course, that doesn’t solve Fermi’s paradox. In fact, instead of being a solution to the Fermi Paradox, Dark Forest suggests that we should already have been visited by aliens. Maybe they come and kick our butts for the habitable planet, maybe they come in the form of a mega-warship which destroys us. Either way, given how long the galaxy has been around, someone should have turned up to wipe us out by now.

I suspect the real solution to the Fermi Paradox is that it’s way harder to evolve intelligent life than we suspect, or that most intelligent species blow themselves up before they become noisy enough for us to notice. And we can leave the existential horror to fiction.

PS. If anyone has watched or read 3 Body Problem, let me know what you thought, please. It strikes me as somewhat Lovecraftian, which has put me off. The basic idea behind Lovecraftian horror is that intelligent people are really stupid (i.e. they stay in the haunted mansion and let the monsters get them when someone dumber would’ve run away). I got a bit frustrated with Lovecraft’s ‘heroes ‘ when I was a lot younger.

I have this weird problem on YouTube. (Don’t we all, I hear you ask.)

For whatever reason, the Almighty Algorithm decided to pop up some videos from The Onion (which I thought didn’t do anything these days). I watched a couple, because I find them funny, so now I see more of them, including the old stuff from a decade ago when they used to have a budget.

My problem now is that I have to double check every ‘news’ video that comes up in case they’re fake ones created by the Onion ten years ago. It’s really hard to tell the difference between stuff they did as parody/satire back then and what’s really happening in the real news today!

We live in Onion Reality. I don’t believe in God, but… God help us.

(This has been your random dose of boredom-induced weird thoughts. And now, back to the editing.)

That’s the winter anime season. I hope I didn’t give you the wrong impression or anything. (he, he, he.)

Frieren and The Apothecary Diaries came to an end last week. My guilty pleasure of the season Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess ended tonight. Level 99… ends tomorrow. I’m sad. *sniff*

Mind you, it’s a good thing in a way. The spring season this year is a bit packed. Like, ‘there aren’t enough hours in the day’ packed. Konosuba, The Slime Isekai, Mushoku Tensei… And those are just the sequel seasons I can think of off the top of my head. Some of the new ones are probably going to be worth watching. Oh, I forgot the third season of The Irregular at Magic High School. That starts soon. Appropriate since I’m writing the seventh Death’s Handmaiden book. I think it’s the Steeplechase Arc which will probably be better as an anime than it was as a novel.

Anyhoo, if you want to watch something which is just plain silly (but also has a hot demon torturer in it), I recommend Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess. Whimsical is the best word I can think of to describe it. (Also, the chief torturer is, like, hot.) Absolutely nothing exciting ever happens, but it is funny. (And did I mention the hot demon torturer?) Oh, and they’ve announced a second season, so that cheered me up a bit. Link below, if you feel like checking it out.

Art dump for The Man Who Was Never There. Link through the cover image.

I didn’t do too many renders for this one, but there is a world map available.

Available now!

• Smashwords
• Amazon ASIN: B0CV17RR9B.
  • US
  • UK
  • DE
  • CA
  • AU

So, this is the cover. The book will be out tomorrow (Monday, Feb 5th). That may turn out to be Tuesday if you’re on the other side of the world from me. I’ll try to get it out as early as possible, but there’s no accounting for Amazon’s submission system.

I made this one brighter. Quite a lot brighter. Hope it works.

The Apothecary Diaries is something of a surprise hit. It’s been going for a few months now; they did a double-season run to kick it off with a short break over Christmas. It’s not a fantasy, it’s basically a fictional historic setting based on imperial China rather than Japan. The unconventional protagonist (pictured above) is Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary who works in the red light district outside the imperial palace. She gets sold as a slave (basically), ends up making herself far too useful in the palace, and gets embroiled in all sorts of mysteries. I’m doing a terrible job of selling it, but if you’re into anime and you skipped it, it’s brilliant.

Now, Maomao has something of an addictive personality. It’s addictive in that it sneaks in and makes you want to watch her adventures, but she’s also the kind of person who gets addicted to things. She has a thing for sampling rare poisons. Luckily, she usually knows how to mitigate them. She also tests curatives and lotions meant for wound treatment by cutting herself to try them out. So, when the Ministry of health, Labour, and Welfare (you may remember them as the bad guys in the last Tatsu book; yes, they are real; and that’s the link to my books to make this sound relevant) were looking to do a campaign about women and addiction, Maomao became the poster girl. Literally. She’s on the cover of the ministry’s monthly health magazine.

There’s an article on Crunchyroll’s site giving more details. If you’re into anime, want something different, and haven’t tried The Apothecary Diaries, I can highly recommend it. It’s available dubbed if you’re not into subtitles, though it’s still airing, so not all of the episodes have been dubbed yet (over half have). I slept on it for about six weeks, and then ended up binging all the episodes I could when I tried it.

Mostly though, I’m posting this because I think it’s awesome to see a character like this promoting women’s health. It’s apparently the first time the ministry has done anything like this. Maybe they won’t end up trying to enforce a totalitarian legal system in the future.

It’s a snow day and my eyes are stinging for some reason, so work is taking a back seat. So, I wanted to write this…

As you may or may not be aware, I’m writing the next Elementary book. Calista has been busy winding herself up over certain people conducting bad science. In this case, it’s the classic kind: I know what my conclusion is, let me find evidence to prove it. It’s amusing in fiction and, of course, those who do it will get their just desserts because it’s fiction. But I’ve also spent the day seeing it happening in real life.

The totally harmless version of this is from Genshin Impact lore. I’ve been playing a lot of Genshin Impact for the past year and, me being me, I’m interested in the lore of the game which is, quite frankly, huge and complex. Seriously, they dragged in elements from just about every major philosophy, mythology, and religion to create the background for a gacha video game! Awesome. You can find lore videos all over YouTube. I recommend Ashikai’s channel, if you feel the need to see what I’m talking about, because she seems to do her research, admits when a theory is probably just guesswork, and has a really soothing voice.

Many theories revolve around Paimon. For those unaware, Paimon is both our in-game companion and mouthpiece, and the ‘face’ of the user interface. One can click a button and enter the Paimon menu which gives access to various user interface features such as the shop, the wishing mechanism, the exit button, and more or less everything else. (This bit’s important) When you enter this menu, your character freezes and Paimon pops out to fly around in front of you. (And, on a PS5, if you blow on the microphone in your controller, it blows Paimon about, which is just the stupidest cool thing ever.) Various people have used this freezing to ‘prove’ that Paimon is a degraded version of the Goddess of Time. There’s other evidence, but here it is: when Paimon appears on-screen in the menu, time stops. Paimon has control over time. Ergo, Paimon is the Goddess of Time.

Except… Now, pointed out in many of these videos is the fact that the wind still blows. You can see it moving grass and leaves, etc. So, Paimon doesn’t stop the wind. Ah, but you see, the wind is associated with Time for various reasons I won’t explain (but they make a little sense), so she wouldn’t stop the wind. And water keeps flowing. But she wouldn’t stop the water for, um, reasons. And butterflies still fly… When I noticed the butterflies, I went looking. Turns out, there’s no discernible pattern to what stops and what remains animated. Named NPCs freeze. Unnamed NPCs remain animated. Cats (probably dogs, maybe other animals) freeze. The robot police officers in the new area (Fontaine) freeze. It’s not consistent. One thing is for certain, it’s nothing to do with Paimon’s true nature. It’s probably some feature of the game engine.

Someone had a theory about something. They went looking for evidence to prove it. They did not do the research, stopping when they found evidence to back their claim and not checking to see whether it really did. Bad science. But it’s hardly going to break the world.

In other news, Trump won Iowa. Early this morning, I watched something about this saying, ‘Look, barely 50% of Republicans actually voted for him. How terrible.’ At lunchtime, I watched another video which pointed out that no one has ever got 50% of the vote in Iowa. Trump won by 10% more than anyone has ever managed before. Bad science. Someone has been huffing so much copium that they didn’t bother looking at the actual statistics (probably at all; it’s propaganda; both sides can put out propaganda, and do). This could break the world, and it made me kind of nauseous.

It feels like this kind of thing is getting worse. When it comes to the lore of a video game, who cares? When it’s becoming the most common mode of operation regarding politics and even science, we have a real problem.

Sorry for the rant. Had to get it off my chest. And my eyes are feeling a little better now, so maybe I’ll get some work done. Big heroic seen coming up for an unexpected character. And now you’ll have to wait until April to find out who! Bwahaha!

I’m just posting this render. Sometimes, I get something I really want to render, and I’ve got no reason to do it other than that it’s there. Stonemason sets often result in this. So, here’s Nava standing under an opening in a roof and stuff. It’s a UHD image suitable as wallpaper, if you feel like downloading it. Feel free.

Oh, and zoom in on her thighs. Man, girl could crack walnuts with those. I guess I’ve never really looked at the back of her thighs before.