urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
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User ID: 226
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
It feels like this is the second or third time just this week you’ve presented an argument, had that argument horribly mangled and one element of it (that sounds bad if you don’t pay attention to its place in your argument) blown up into the entirety of your point, and then been accused of being evil and immoral on the basis of that grievous misinterpretation of your point. For what it’s worth, I think you’ve made some good arguments lately (even if I don’t always agree with them) and I encourage you to stay the course.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I fully agree with this. I’m a zoomer, and many of my friends, including me, waited a long time to get drivers licenses, or be independent, or live outside the childhood home, etc. Seeing this as entirely or even mostly the result of restrictions put on by parents just doesn’t reflect what I’ve seen in my generation — it was voluntary, not imposed. The internet supplied enough pleasure to make leaving the house feel like a chore rather than an exciting prospect.
I think older generations find this hard to understand — why don’t you want to rebel? — which means that it’s easy to misattribute it to rules. I don’t doubt that this has had an effect. Maybe more so on gen alpha, I don’t know. But the internet has been for my generation what the car was for older ones — it’s the means of freedom and exploration. Why go through all the trouble of driving when the glass Skinner box gives you all the pleasure you could ever want?
It just so happens that the freedom and exploration it offers doesn’t actually make people connected to others.
That, rather than anything boomers did or conservatives did or geotracking did or the woke did, is the cause of stunted interpersonal development among the younger generations. We didn’t get rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll but keep the social connections — which is what social conservatives wanted — we got rid of the social connections, which got rid of the sex and drugs and rock and roll. That the kids are unhappy in a situation where the sex and drugs are gone doesn’t say a single thing about whether social conservatives were right — the variables aren’t controlled. And the social conservatives definitely didn’t get what they want.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Sure. Fully agree that a positive vision is needed. But I disagree strongly that social conservatives didn’t have one, or that they aimed entirely to eliminate vice rather than supply virtue. That’s a caricature that could only be written by their enemies.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
This is simple to understand: it’s because the reason the kids are having less sex and doing less drugs is that they’re less healthy, socially connected, and happy — not because they’re following the social conservative model of being healthy, socially connected, and happy. The ideology of social conservatives is not “the kids must do less drugs, and I don’t care about anything else.”
We could solve drug abuse by just shooting anyone who’s addicted to drugs, but somehow I don’t expect that this would make anyone very happy.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
I'm glad it resonated!
If you're the sort of person who wears your heart on your sleeve (as I am), then it can be very easy and tempting to pour yourself out in the environments you find yourself, like the internet. That can be incredibly useful, and powerful, and there have been times when exposing some of my most intense concerns to internet discussion has made my life better. But there have also been many times where it's made it worse.
I always like to remember the parable of Jesus where he says "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." If your treasure is in internet respect, then internet disrespect will be like wounds to the heart. And the more you invest yourself in internet discussions, the more of yourself you share, the more you're putting your treasure there.
While sometimes I enjoy internet discussions and even arguments, I've come to realize they're incredibly limited, and need to be entered into and continued carefully. I've started and chosen not to post more posts than I've ever published, because I realized the post would be fruitless, or lead to unnecessary dispute, or was excessively disagreeable, or simply would expose a vulnerability that shouldn't be exposed to the internet.
I think older nettizens find it easy to create a barrier between the internet and real life, understanding the boundaries appropriate to both. In particular, the old-school attitude of the net (which the motte participates in in some ways) was always that disagreeableness was inevitable and everything was under debate rules.
And under that framework, you shouldn't expose a weakness in your worldview any more than your defense attorney should make an argument for the prosecution. In part this represented the initial population of the internet -- male, educated, systems-oriented, academic. And in part it represents the reality that the internet is simply a cacophony of strangers. I don't know you. You don't know me. We have no relationship, no ties, I could insult you and swear death and devastation on you, and unless I crossed a legal boundary so severely that it got the real police involved, this would have no impact at all on my life outside of the net. I might get banned, but what is a ban? Nothing.
I'm not sure how old you are. I'm fairly young. Young enough that the internet has been real life for about as long as I've been active on it. But old enough to find online dating new-fangled, fr fr. (Did I use that correctly?) I think younger generations are having to re-learn the wisdom that the net is volatile and operates under debate rules. It's an important lesson. And like the law -- anything you say can and will be used against you, and the consequences for the misuse of that power are minimal.
Like everything, the internet is about risk vs reward. That's different for everyone. But hopefully, from the discomfort of seeing just how freely personal attacks flow on the internet, you can help yourself judge where the risk-benefit line stands for you. It obviously varies by context. But my personal view is that the places where discussing important aspects of your worldview, especially ones you're not sure about, has benefit outweighing risk is almost 0. But that's for you to decide. And I wish the best for you in deciding it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I apologize for my irritated tone, I just hate when there are such beneficial policies that have been tried and tested in lots of other places, that get shot down for stupid reasons in the US because they threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you.
I agree with you that, in a vaccum, limited cars in cities would be fantastic. I love the way European villages work. I think, as an ideal, cities with strong public transportation and limited congestion are a great place to live. In theory, I'm rah-rah urbanism.
But no discussion of transportation and suburbanization in the US can happen without a co-equal discussion about crime and safety.
The reason Americans cling to their cars and their commutes is simple: the cities are not safe. I personally know people who lived the urbanist dream, living downtown in a city, and then fled to the suburbs because they watched a man die from a gunshot out their window. I've ridden the train and had to make decisions about how to deal with a clearly psychotic man with no understanding of reality, and thus posed a real danger to himself and the people around him. I've seen and walked by the tent cities. I've seen, with my own eyes, the fentanyl zombies whose presence in our greatest cities can be described only as seriously-discomfiting, as human urban blight, as the broken windows of man that reveals and invites immense public disorder and ugliness. I've read the crime stats.
The right perceives this danger profoundly and seriously, and it shapes many of their political priorities, from gun rights to car rights. They want the ability to live without fear, while still being able to have access to the centers of economic activity that are our cities. Having a car means having a physical, metal, lockable bubble that separates you from exterior threats, while being able to easily and autonomously navigate yourself out of the urban center without having to share a means of transportation with people who may mean you harm.
Your post seems to reveal that your concerns about cars are the mirror image of conservative concerns about crime: you see them as dangerous to public safety, and ugly. And you're not wrong! I have serious and real concerns about the size of our vehicles and the number and behavior of them in cities.
But the American right has judged that the danger to them from automobiles -- which indeed is massive, grave, and serious -- is less important to them than the massive, grave, and serious risk posed to them by urban crime and disorder. They would rather be hurt accidentially by a driver than intentionally by a robber. You can find this wrong, or seriously misguided, or silly, but nevertheless it means that their political views on the issue are shaped by actual concerns about the world rather than "advanced car-brain virus." It means that you might have to engage with their concerns realistically, and maybe make concessions, rather than accusing them of harboring a mental parasite. It's much easier to just handwave them away, just as it's much easier for the right to say that anyone with concerns about the Trump administration has a terminal case of TDS.
The urban problems in the US are mostly US-specific, shaped by US concerns. For that reason, your opponents reject that these are beneficial policies based on being tried and tested in other places. The US is not other places, and has unique problems. The US is not Europe, as my liberal friends delight in reminding me.
Left-wingers want to get the cars out of the city, and right-wingers want to get the crime out of the cities. Both have their ebb and flow, as one side of the argument gains more power, but the Democratic strongholds in most US cities ensures that things flow mostly in one direction.
For that reason, Republicans will cling to their cars as a fundamental part of their identity, because it's the only thing that secures them the ability to participate in the economic activity of society while permitting them and their families to live in the suburbs, where they can have greater security for their possessions and families. And where they can offer to their children a chance at an education in a school where bullies and criminals are disciplined, and children aren't smoking weed in the bathrooms -- a real set of concerns expressed by a family who left Oregon to move to the rural, delapidated town in flyover country where my girlfriend grew up. We're actually at the point where it's safer and better for your children to live in bumfuck nowhere than in our most prominent states.
If liberals want conservatives to be hands-off and support restrictions on car culture, the first thing to do is to clean up the cities and make them temples of safety, security, and prosperity. What is needed is to support policies that arrest, convict, and incarcerate (for long periods) drug addicts, criminals, and other beacons of public disorder. In other words, to stop opposing policies that "threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars criminals that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you." Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them.
But until that day: "haha car go vroom vroom."
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
This is an incredibly condescending post that misunderstands the nuanced point about social incentives that's being made by FCfromSSC. In particular, you're responding to a claim that even the Republican-appointed judges are shaped in their judicial philosophy by the social mileu and ideological influence of Democrats in positions of cultural authority, like the mainstream media, by simply restating that they're Republican-appointed. You're not even engaging with his point!
You're making an argument from authority, and FCfromSSC is saying that the authorities themselves are compromised, or driven by social and ideological incentives and beliefs he disagrees with. He's saying the Pope is the antichrist, and you're quoting him from the first council of the Vatican.
That suggests to me that you're not engaging with him in good faith. He knows what you're saying. Your argument, and the constitutional provision you're posting, are within his grasp. He doesn't need a refresher on the constitution any more than a Catholic who doesn't believe in God needs a refresher on ecumenical councils. You're quoting the Bible to an atheist.
You can disagree with his point, and you can even make strong arguments against it, many of which I might disagree with. But to actually answer it substantively, you'll have to look at the belief systems of the actors in question, their overall judicial philosophies, their social environments, their incentives. You'd have to address the point.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
And when you read that comment, inside your brain you know that it is bait, and more importantly you know you are right, that's why you argued in the first place.
I think this is actually the crux of the issue -- I can't speak for @thejdizzler, but the bait that hurts the most is the bait that appeals to areas where you're not certain you're right. Like @Southkraut says, ad hominems have their appeal because they bypass any attempt at actually engaging with the issue substantively. The intent is to make someone doubt their judgment, not by criticizing the judgment itself, but by imposing doubt on their ability to make a judgment at all. If that hits at the right place at the right time, it can hit a sore spot, where someone already doubts their ability to make a judgment or even fears that they've made a dangerously wrongheaded one.
Obviously the solution is to find a firm footing for yourself and place some trust in your own judgment, but that can be very hard, especially when the issue in question is as intense, emotionally charged, and hard to answer as the sorts of questions that are summoned by the culture war. That's why you see so many ad hominems that target people's relationship with the opposite sex -- relationship length and satisfaction is cratering, sexual mores seem to change by the hour, and there's a sense that the bottom has fallen out of all the stable norms that allowed people to understand themselves as good and worthy partners. That moral vaccum enables malicious actors to exploit uncertainty by claiming the 100% guaranteed, certified, free range moral high ground, a kind of moral arbitrage in a market that's not sure what the price is. There are whole twitter threads now where progressive and conservative men shout slurs at each other, both implying that their ideologies are so pathetic that they alone make them repulsive to women. ("Incel!" "Cuck!")
I also get the sense that jdizzler is pretty agreeable, and agreeable people find it very hard to stomach people not liking them for reasons totally outside their control because of their drive for social harmony. There are also a lot of people who don't so much argue as think out loud, and if someone's earnest thinking-out-loud prompts an ad hominem, that can be pretty destabilizing, like kicking someone when they're trying to get up.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I hate both extremes of the obesity conversation. One extreme -- of which there are examples -- is people who just flat out hate fat people, hate looking at them, have no compassion or understanding of any obstacles that have kept them in that state, and desire to shame and bully them for its own sake. I recall one motte user said something like, "people don't like fat people, don't want to be around them, and don't want to be friends with them."
I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about. But when that post happened, I had to update in their direction. I had to update in the same way that seeing tumblrinaction posts that went "KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN." forced me to update my views on feminism, and started my turn from feminist-sympathetic to anti-feminist. There are certainly some people who hate the obese enough to segregate away from them.
The other extreme, of course, says that CICO is wrong not only as the sole guidance, but as the biochemical explanation of what's going on at a basic level. That's obviously false.
But I'm convinced there are more in the anti-obese extreme than in the pro-obese extreme, which is why I consider myself a moderate anti-fat-stigma person. Not in the sense that I believe being fat is good or healthy, but in the sense that I believe the shaming doesn't do the job, and just makes a bad situation worse, isolating people who need support rather than helping them take agency and affect their choices in whatever ways they can.
Health positivity, and not fat shaming, is the way to go. We should be promoting healthy, delicious meals that provide balanced nutrition, and socially boosting drinks that aren't drenched in sugar while providing the social and psychological appeal soda has. (Right now, soda is one of the only beverages you can get everywhere at a consistent quality. That should change.) Insofar as the fat activists oppose that, I oppose them.
The point is that people's desire for the obese to lose weight should be based in a concern for their health and a desire to see them live long, healthy lives, not from an aesthetic revulsion or contempt. The point of a lot of the discussion about set points is to encourage the view that "but for the grace of God go I."
The reality is that the cause of the obesity crisis is directly related to sedentary lifestyles, easily available cheap, calorie-dense food, and more sweets on store shelves than in a Wonka factory. They're social factors. We've put the human organism in an environment where our instincts -- like craving sweet fruit, which is relatively uncommon and seasonal in nature, or prizing meat, which was always the result of a bit of cleverness or a bit of strength -- backfire on us. What was once rare, and thus craved and hoarded, is now commonplace. And so like a dragon in a treasure vault, we hoard and we hoard. We're built for an environment where the most rewarding food takes the most work, but we live in a world of convenience foods and candy. Of course many people are going to lose control! (I believe the same about pornography. It should not be possible for millions of strangers to see Belle Delphine's vagina.)
The solution has to be social changes -- I think liberals are right and car culture is a big problem -- coupled with regulation, and medical marvels that help shift the needed willpower into a range more people have, as we're seeing now. But the big problem is that people's emotions, aesthetics, and experiences are getting mixed up with the data, and it seems impossible to talk about the ability of personal choices to improve health without getting called 'fatphobic', or to talk about the real and enduring social, biological, and psychological barriers that make it hard for many people to use willpower to control the problem without getting accused of using 'fatty logic'.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
A car is a system.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I believe you posted this under the wrong top level comment.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
But last time either tried to exercise authority in north Africa, they were humiliated.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
I think there’s definitely some acting, but also just getting a huge group of people to agree enough on something in the absence of coercion is really hard. US whips are impotent, and congresscritters are fairly free to vote however they please.
It’s hard enough to get 5 people to agree on dinner plans. Imagine trying to get 538 people to agree on spending $200 billion on something!
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
It’s not really stealing, that’s actually what it’s called in psychology.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
What would motivate Democrats to support what Trump is going on tariffs?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
For what it's worth, I didn't read your comment as passive-agressive.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
Is it PMC men who turned against wokeness the most? Last I checked Harris still won college-educated white men.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
In the West, she's almost always portrayed as wearing blue, though it's not given symbolic thought the same way it is in Eastern iconography. Red permeates the coloration of Eastern sacred art, but it just doesn't have the same meaning of divinity in the West and instead red is concentrated on the celebration of martyrs. If you asked a thoughtful Catholic what the color of divinity and grace is, they'd say white or gold, like baptismal gowns and haloes.
I've sometimes seen Western art where Jesus has a blue sash, but blue, especially light blue, is really strongly associated with the clothing of the Virgin Mary and so you'll find it called "Mary's color." But white is also always used, usually for her veil. I've heard that blue became prominent because lapis lazuli was expensive and so spending a lot on her coloration was a way of showing her status, but I just think blue was a calming color and there's a strong association between her and peace and quiet. ("Peace on earth")
That being said, I have a coffee table book of medieval Catholic art, and you can notice that red covering blue was common in early medieval Roman art, with Byzantine imitations being a big trend. There was a flip flop at one point, with blue over red becoming more common in Western art. This morphed into just blue being an option. But if her gown has any color other than blue, it's probably red. Black is occasionally an option: the color of mourning. Nevertheless you can still find red-over-blue artworks in the West for hundreds of years, like this artwork from 12th century Spain.
I'm sure there's an enterprising Russian or Athonite who's written a screed describing this artistic history as evidence of Latin perfidy, but even if we stick with the blue=humanity, red=divinity model, there's an argument to be made for both colors. She was overshadowed by divine grace, covering humanity with divinity, but also contained the divine son and granted him humanity, concealing the image of god inside her human body. I wish we could go back and interview 800s Frankish painters, but as far as I know figuring out what these colors meant to them is mostly guesswork.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
That's a good point! Mass Effect 2 was absolutely what I thought about when I said stories could create compelling gameplay if your choices impact character outcomes. It's also a good example of what you said, that your character and story choices impact the mechanics you have available to you in major challenges. At their best, story-driven games have the mechanics and the gameplay feed into each other so that broad segments of the playerbase see both elements as compelling.
I'm rarely a "take notes so I can min/max" person, but I will absolutely admit to using guides to maximize my story choices for the final battle.
My dislike of ME2 was shaped by the fact that I never played the games when they were coming out, and I played them all in Legendary Edition for the first time. So a lot of the graphical and mechanical hard edges of ME1 were shaved off, so I enjoyed it more than a lot of people did, while ME2's tangential storyline stood out more as I was playing them in sequence and felt myself dragged away from the Reapers storyline in a way players who played them years apart might not have felt.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
1mo ago
Mass Effect 2 was a massive side quest where Martin Sheen derails the plot for no reason. The character writing was interesting but I didn't like it as much as 1. I actually enjoyed ME3 more, despite the flaws, because it felt like the actual plot of the trilogy was relevant and we needed to make progress on it.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
The closest one for me was architect. But I did notice in some of their marketing materials for their consulting services the QF people talk about "World Designers", who have the fantasy and design motivations that are my strongest, and is described as "almost entirely women in their mid 20s." So that's... good to know, I guess.
I looked at the same PDF and they happened to give a profile of skirmishers (no such luck for slayers):
Skirmishers find very little appeal in world-building features—e.g., rich lore, stories, interesting NPCs, an interesting world to explore, and customization opportunities. To them, this is all unnecessary fluff in a video game.
You're breaking my heart here. :( But I'm guessing "slayer" came up for you because you're more likely than the skirmishers to value story.
It says you are unlikely to enjoy Dragon Age, Portal, Crusader Kings, The Sims, The Witcher, Cities: Skylines, Fallout 3, Knights of the Old Republic, and for some reason Tetris. Do you happen to enjoy Halo, Apex Legends, Cuphead, DOOM, Cuphead, or PUBG?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
If you die on the intestate, you're on the highway to hell.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
I disagree -- not because I think your preferences are invalid, I just have totally different ones. Story in games is hard to do right, but I do believe it can be compelling if the story is actually part of the interactive elements of the game and not just a framework for the gameplay. That's only the case if you're actively making choices that affect the outcomes for particular characters and having to make tradeoffs to accomplish an ending that satisfies your concern for the characters and their world. That's why people were so angry at the Mass Effect 3 endings -- all your choices and progress meant very little in terms of the conclusion, you just had to pick from a fixed set of options based on your progression in the third game rather than having your particular choices throughout the trilogy result in a unique ending.
So game stories only matter if participating in the story is part of the player's set of choices. Linear stories with no branching paths or player choice are to player-driven stories what walking simulators are to gameplay. Branching stories with mutually exclusive options are also deeply replayable, because you can make wildly different choices each time and see different parts of the game. Note how players keep replaying and replaying Fallout New Vegas, Witcher 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect, etc.
I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like. Mine doesn't really match up with any of their archetypes, I like the immersion and creativity motivations almost to the exclusion of the others. So I'll engage in gameplay if it rewards me with positive story outcomes or character immersion or a cosmetic that fits my character's style or something I can use to create a thing in the game world, but I don't find gameplay inherently compelling, except for racing games, for some reason. Games are for me an excuse to exercise imagination in an interactive fictional world, not to demonstrate competence or achievement except insofar as those drive the fantasy. (So I might think of my character's progression in terms of the obstacles they've overcome or the achievements they've made, but it's not all that important that I've overcome them.) I'm a game world enthusiast and I see a player-driven story as part of participating in the game world.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
In Warcraft III the story - the best I can tell about it was that it was manufactured. I don't think that anyone felt any kind of connection to any of the characters. It felt that the story was trying to tell you what to feel about the characters and not make you (btw - problem of the woke movies too) feel it.
Yeah, Blizzard's writing has always been more like a series of events that happen to occur chronologically rather than any kind of story with a plot. Sometimes you get the sense they expect something will have a big emotional payoff and give it a big cutscene, and it's just a character introduced 20 minutes ago randomly doing something for random reasons invented on the spot.
The Warcraft universe kind of feels like if you trained an LLM on Tolkien, D&D, and heavy metal lyrics, and then had it create a fantasy story. Everything is an exaggerated version of the shared consciousness about what a "dwarf" is or what an "elf" is or what medieval fantasy looks like. And sometimes is just an exaggerated version of the real world for some reason, so we get New Jersey gangster goblins and Jamaican Trolls who love the Loa, mon.
This is why we got the terrible terrible surreal God Of War 3 ending (kratos is hope he is chasing a little girl to the light), terrible Mass Effect 3 ending( little girl and the light) and the whole gears of war.
A lot of this stuff just feels like the 1990s-early 2010s. Anyone remember early Five Gum ads? Or heck, Bionicle. There was a trend towards hard-edged and tryhard atmospheres, everything had to be edgy and serious even if it didn't warrant it. People praise those Playstation 2 ads, but they seem like surrealist nonsense with no actual connection to video games. It really does feel like the "burgers?" meme.
Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?
I wouldn't say I'm into hard science fiction, but I think you need to be careful about inserting vague spiritualist nonsense in a story about technology. The spiritual and humanistic elements of a story about technology have to arise from the impact of technology on people and how it changes their perception of the world, not from spiritual powers imposed from the outside.
I enjoy stories about technology, but the problem with science fiction is that its authors have always been too Big Five Open for their own good and have squirted strange new ideas onto the page alongside the thoughtful reflections about the future of science and tech. I will say, for a cluster of people so committed to materialism and atheism, science fiction authors seem strangely compelled to write about beings of pure spirit and gods.
You can tell a compelling genre story about characters struggling against evil, but you have to think about characters and their motivations and have them act accordingly. I don't understand why game stories leaned so heavily into pseudo-mystical elements to add depth (poorly) instead of character motivations, which is the way in which deep stories actually stick with people. Your game will not be the source of a spiritual awakening, but it might inspire someone to strive for what is just and right, which is an important message that's easily possible.
This prompts an interesting question for me -- who's actually in charge? If some sort of major crisis happens, or some terrorist incident happens that disrupts the conclave, or something especially dire, who coordinates the response? Who is empowered to make sure things run properly?
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