Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
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User ID: 589
Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
21d ago
You almost certainly did. Caelum Est Conterrens was the first "big" fic-of-fic written for FiO. Really, even though I'm more than a bit ambivalent about them, there's an argument that FiO never would have gotten large as it did had Chatoyance first promoted it to their personal fandom, then wrote their fic of it. Both of those things happened very early in FiO's snowball to fame. Despite everything that happened, I probably owe them on net.
Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
21d ago
rational fanfiction is without exaggeration one of the most intellectually influential literary movements of the 21st century, and notwithstanding that, it is substantially about ponies
100% true. No lie detected. I have no conflict of interest with this claim and am an impartial observer.
Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
2yr ago
I reject the idea that purpose has connotations of intention, and suspect that a large part of contention around the obvious truism that "The Purpose of a System is What It Does" comes from this conflation. If I were to say "The purpose of the mitochondria is to generate ATP, which is then consumed by the rest of the cell to power it," this sentence is properly using 'purpose' by evaluating What The System Does, in a case where there could not be an intention.
Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
2yr ago
The point of having the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" is to point out that intentions don't matter. Yes, someone intended X to be the outcome, but the system reliably does Y instead, and very quickly, other actors start relying on the Y-outcomes of the system because The Purpose of a System is What It Does, and rely on it to continue to do Y.
In this case, people intended for these NGOs to solve homelessness, but because of game theory and principal agent problems, it, uh, does other things. But those intentions are irrelevant because we now have a machine that redistributes funds for moral maze like reasons and a whole bunch of people who rely on this system to keep doing that.
Iceman
Through Friendship and Ponies
3yr ago
Surely that can't be right?
Why can't that be right? What model of the world precludes it?
I watched from the inside as a major FANG company got taken over, where the culture changed from technical excellence to 'social responsibility' or whatnot. So why shouldn't one expect that Merely Reddit got captured by a social cabal?
So with the disclaimer that this is from memory a decade and a half ago, there was a point where more people were reading and pointing at Caelum Est Conterrens instead of Friendship is Optimal. This was very early on, but Chatoyance had their own circle and a nontrivial amount of FiO's fame percolated outwards first from Chat promoting FiO to their circle and then writing Caelum. My recollection was that it was like this for several years. There was a lot of people thinking that FiO was cringe and was poorly written (and to be fair...), but found the entire premise and worldbuilding wonderful, and thus shared fics in the same verse.
...since this is the Culture War Thread and connects to OP's post...the obvious reason in retrospect was that the humanizing of David's plight and his worries were completely unacceptable going into the Woke era in the 2010s. I worked on FiO starting in 2011, release it in 2012, and had already softened the content of David's arc down on the advice of friends. Even then, a lot of people were turned off by this and how FiO humanized its two male viewpoint character's desires (even Lars gets his bar). Caelum was much safer to share, for if you share heretical media, that marks you as a heretic too.
But this has also given FiO its own sort of longevity.
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