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Wellness Wednesday for July 26, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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New web serial out from yours truly:

Presenting The Dao of Simulation :

Isaac Kai was a pretty normal dude living in the 21st century, having lived a rather unremarkable life until a few of his investments paid off big time and he volunteered for an experimental mind upload program during the First Singularity. He then went on to live for a few million years, with little to show for it except a few quadrillion descendants.

But for the Isaac running in a historical Ancestor Simulation set in 2023, his lack of fame is his downfall. He's the perfect pawn for a Cultivation Sim on the brink of bankruptcy, desperate to pay off its mounting debts.

Chosen by an underpaid and overworked AI with a questionable sense of humor. Isaac is yanked from his comfortable, albeit boring, existence and thrust into a world that's as rich and complex as it is utterly bonkers.

Welcome to "The Dao of Simulation", where game development has gone off the rails and the laws of physics are more like mild suggestions. Isaac must navigate this new reality, where death is a one-way ticket to oblivion and a million Ancestor Worshippers are watching his every move.

It's Xianxia but the author is abusing his Ritalin script. Nobody knows if the aliens are supposed to be there or not, but it's intentional that you can just be Cultivating and minding your own business till a peasant finds a railgun. Buckle up!

It was an enjoyable read on my way back from work. I was a bit confused about what's a Cultivation, and what's an Ancestor Simulation but re-reading the blurb sorted it out for me. I may have also been paying too much attention to the bug reports (and scratching my head afterwards), on the assumption that they'll provide insight into the rules of the world you're setting up.

Anyway, consider me intrigued, I'll keep reading!

Some of the bug reports certainly allude to future events, just as the issues with disconnected players just vibing in there, but if they're already fixed, then it's just random worldbuilding (I like funny Dwarf Fortress patch notes)

I'm surprised that someone who isn't at least passingly familiar with Xianxia read this! Cultivation is basically Chinese Fantasy, or at least a big part of it. It involves absurd power scaling, like the Big Bad Evil Guy from a typical Western novel, like Sauron, would be a dog's dog in a Xianxia novel after the first few chapters. You should look at the tropes, they're a hoot.

An Ancestor Simulation relates to the Simulation Hypothesis, in this case it's some distant civilization running a simulation of their ancestral environment, it's been a long time since humanity left Earth and took over the stars, but there are always weirdos who like poking at the old monkeys, even the virtual ones.