u/MvflG

Okay, hear me out here.

So, for those in the RP community, especially those in Discord-based RPs, you must be familiar with Tupperbox. For those who aren't, the way Tupperbox works is that you register a character with a text bracket:

>tul!register 'Character Name' [bracket]text

So when you're in a server with the Tupperbox bot, all you have to do is type in:

>[bracket]some text here

And the bot will replace your character with a proxy:

>Character Name[APP]
some text here

---

Sound familiar? That's because say statements and character objects work similarly in Ren'Py. First, you define a character object:

>define [variable] = Character("Character Name")

So when you code your game, all you have to do for dialogue is type in:

>[variable] "Some dialogue here"

Which Ren'Py spits out as:

>Character Name
Some dialogue here

---

Anyway, that's how I intuitively got the hang of say statements as a long-time Discord RPer.

Just wondering if anyone had fallen into the same rabbit hole I did.

Back in secondary school, when I was a curious, twice-exceptional little lad, I looked into genius/gifted studies and ways to optimise my intelligence. A lot of the sources I found, such as Tony Buzan, Adam Khoo, Kazimierz Dąbrowski, or various gifted mommy blogs, were genuinely helpful. But there was an unhelpful source, which I'm sure has rung a bell, which was Libb Thims' genius rankings and articles on the nature and habits of genius.

I should've stopped there. After all, powerscaling geniuses is folly (a realisation that took me an embarrassingly long time). But I continued, and was immersed in his Human Chemical Thermodynamics theory, which 200+ IQ prodigies have supposedly formulated independently. I put him on a pedestal and became obsessed with determining love and morality through thermodynamics, while failing to grasp the basics of thermodynamics myself.

Even when I've gotten the hang of the concepts, kinda, and I've realised that modelling atrocities through thermodynamics as he did (claiming the 1939 invasion of Poland involves the same amount of mechanical work as air molecules pushing up a piston in a Carnot engine, for example, or claiming that Nada al-Ahdal's forced marriage is wrong because it's endergonic and therefore unnatural) is moral cowardice, I still have this thought in the back of my mind that it's still possible to use thermodynamics to figure out the nature of sex, and that I need to learn more.

Recently, these quotes have gotten to my head and made me feel a sense of imposter syndrome, even when I know he's a fraud:

>"If you haven't haven't studied chemical thermodynamics, calculated your own molecular formula, and derived the equations of existence, you're an imbecile; there doesn't seem to be anyway else to put things."

>The short answer to this, as I have come to learn, is that you need to take calculus I, II, and III, possibly even matrix algebra, up through partial differential equations, to even have the education prerequisites to read Clausius‘ Mechanical Theory of Heat, wherein the first and second main principles of the universe are presented, which needed to understand the nature of sex:
M + F → Baby
which is governed by chemical thermodynamics:
ΔG < 0
Namely, according to present models, it is a number of units of heat, each unit symbolized by:
δQ = an exact-differential unit of a quantity of heat
Which in the evolution sense are units of thermo-nuclear reaction heat 🔥 from the sun ☀️ , or its derivatives in the form of social heat units.

>Whence, as an early teenager to mid 20s, your hormones will be in full swing, and you will “desire” sex, greatly. Yet, you won’t be able to understand the nature of the governing mechanism, i.e. the rules of the game, until you learn calculus to partial differential equations, per reason that you need the latter to understand what an “inexact differential” is, in the first place. 

I can't be alone in being brainwashed by him, right? Because it's hard to shake off the impulse to learn more, read more, and do more maths until I understand how sex and attraction work without relying on pure vibes, and it's also just as hard to shake off the thought that I don't understand sex and attraction because I don't understand enough maths. (And this is after I've read Foucault. Foucault!)

As the title says, I can actually master any skill (or at least learn enough to be able to share with others) as long as I'm 1. interested, and 2. put effort in.

Problem is, the stuff I actually do enjoy is just fluff. Sure, I'm great at history, philosophy, and literary analysis, but what about the real-life stuff that matters? Not just stuff like cooking or business or maths (which I do have to master as I'll be expected by family to manage food and property business), but also deep stuff that helps me understand who I am and how I come to be.

I want to learn chemical thermodynamics, I really do. I want to understand the laws that govern our universe and the nature of sex, especially since I'm so sexually stunted and terrified of my own sexuality. But before reading Clausius, I'll have to master calculus/PDEs and linear algebra, and I could barely get through pre-calc and can't grasp how nullspaces and eigenvectors work.

It also brings to mind another worry. What if I'm forever doomed to lack the aptitude or interest in higher-level maths, and I'll never be able to get the answers I want?

To start off, I've been juggling game development and my thesis. I'm pretty far into my scriptwriting, I have a few sprites set and will do backgrounds shortly, and I am set to have my first thesis defence in a week or two.

Unfortunately, since life is funny like that, I had a brief psychotic break from Wednesday to yesterday, launching into a whole conspiracy about Egyptian deities and the letters B and G/Gj, and at some point, both my thesis and the script looked suspicious to me because 1) my thesis advisor's name starts with G, and 2) I used BG as script tags for backgrounds.

Anyway, I'm okay-ish right now, and I'm working on my thesis. But considering how my VN involves heavy themes like totalitarianism and assault, should I immediately return to working on my VN like I feel like doing, or give myself a break?

(I know this sounds like a troll post, but just hear me out here.)

I've been a fan of Goethe's Elective Affinities (1809) for the longest time, since I was in secondary school, and I've always been under the impression that it was a rehashed version of one of his scrapped novels, The Renouncers. Basically, according to one of its assistants, it has a harem-type plot where one dude is in love with four women, each with their own qualities that made them lovable, and has to choose one. But he ditched the concept because it wasn't appealing to readers or something?

So, anyway, I was trying to look up more information about it (since the idea of the harem genre existing in 1800s Germany is lowkey hilarious to me), but all I could find from legit sources was Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (1821), and the one source that confirmed this scrapped novel was... questionable.

Am I being punked here? 'Cause I'm kinda losing it over this.

While researching Goethe's Elective Affinities (1809), I've found a misinterpretation on the Narcissus myth that has left me scratching my head.

To quote,

>In 8AD, Ovid, told the myth of Narcissus and Echo, according to which Narcissus thinks of everything in terms of "anthropisms', i.e. human ideals and views projected throughout the universe, such that when he looks into water, all he sees his his reflection, there after falling into the water mesmerized by his own human perceived beauty, and drowns. In 1809, Goethe remade this myth, to the effect that if we look into a chemical reaction beaker, and try to search around for human-based things such as life, death, beauty, and morality, we will fall into the beaker and drown in our own anthropisms. Correctly, in order to have our vision restored, we have to rid ourselves of anthropism, deanthropomorphize our thinking, and begin to "physio-chemicalize" our views of ourselves in respect to the reactions we have to each other and withing society.

>The "ECHO cypher" is with reference to Ovid's 8AD Metamorphosis, which outlines, in poetic form, and early form of evolution or morphed form change over time, from the interaction of heat, earth, and water. In the Ovid version of the story, all Narcissus sees when he looks into the pool of water is his "own reflection", which he deems as so "beautiful", that he drowns in the water. In the Goethe version, Narcissus looks into the water seeing chemical reactions, such as oxygen O2 reacting with hydrogen H2 to form water H2O:
H2 + ½O2 ⟶ H2O
But, in stead of looking at these reactions and seeing them for what they are, Narcissus "anthropomorphizes" them, and imbues or applies human-based attributes to them, e.g. that they are alive, that they are on love, and things like beauty and morality, etc.

Glaring issues aside (I'm pretty sure Narcissus didn't drown), the essence of this take is that Narcissus met his fate because he assigned/projected human ideals to objects that have none, which I'm sure isn't the point??

I mean, Goethe did allude to the Narcissus myth in Elective Affinities (both via the characters' initials, Edward, Charlotte, Hauptmann, and Ottilie, and via Edward mentioning how 'man is a true Narcissus. He makes the whole world his mirror'), but I can't find a single Goethe text that retells the myth with Narcissus looking at water molecules forming.