There's some #Spamton bit in #Deltarune, I cannot remember the specifics, where he's selling his whatevers and the prices are all varying up and down so you have to jump in at the right moment to buy something at a price you can *actually* afford, and far be it from me to politicize a video game...

...but I think *maybe* there was a weensy tiny smol speck of social realism in #Deltarune, and M. @tobyfox.undertale.com was maybe trying to make a point about "push pricing" or whatever they call it. I can't recall when I first heard about this idea. I feel like there's a lot of pressure behind it.

you know what I mean? most of us growing up over the decades might remember this kind of chaotic pricing scheme most vividly when shopping for plane tickets and the nightmare thing was, you could tell that the #SoftwareDevelopers were really excited about it. they thought it was wonderful. ~Chara

in fact there are a LOT of similar ideas that #ComputerScience and #Software people have had over the last few decades, some of which I saw for myself when trying to hold a software engineering post at Amazon dot com in 2001 (not the worst job I've ever had but close) of basically the same nature.

it's like they bought a building of a given size, thought "wow okay there's room for thousands of software engineers in here, the more the merrier!" then filled the building up, got some bosses to say "now make us a website that makes people happy!!!!" and...that's about it. I recall no purpose. 🔴

I am not sure what I expected but when I went some "shitty startup" to one of the biggest names in #Seattle software development...however naive I might have been, I was expecting an *upgrade*. But no. The shitty startup was pointless; Amazon was pointless times a thousand. It melted my brain. 🔴

I could never get a definite answer to any question I ever asked. There were "managers" but I never felt managed. I think it was about that time that I flashed back to my 1990s recollections of #CSLewis and "That Hideous Strength" and thought, you know maybe Jack Lewis was onto something. ~Chara

Seriously. Amazon unsettled me so badly that once I finally fled I started looking into #Christianity seriously for the first time. I really did feel like I'd seen Hell. Maybe it wasn't quite as bad as Wither and Frost (oh but they would eventually show up) but I was stunned. Nobody seemed to care!

I find myself thinking about how, as generally wretched as @caltech.edu was, there were still a lot of relatively good oases and places to hide from the gangbanging Blacker Hovse "mole" crowd. I swear...M. Night Shyamalan might have made "The Village" based on some of the shit I saw there. ~Chara

It's quite possible he got a tipoff from some Caltech student or something: "hey Night I wanna tell you something really fucked up about the Caltech experience!" I have no idea what sort of friends M. Night Shyamalan has but...I mean, he's a great film director. He probably runs with a bright crowd.

Because "the bloods" at Blacker Hovse, did, in fact, have crude mole costumes they'd scare students with. I do now wonder if M. Night Shyamalan was telling an indirect story about insular *college campus* life. Surely there's other similar tales--each big campus is its own bottle universe. ~Chara

Anyway, Caltech had some fringe pleasures to lighten the experience day-to-day but Amazon dot com was almost without light. I felt like nobody around me was...an intellectual peer. I never got that impression from anyone hardly. At the shitty startup I at least met someone I could smoke weed with.

And someone else I could play chess with. Very important, weed and chess. Good solid pastimes both. Anyway I left that life and did a lot of things and tried not to think about it, so it's a bit shocking to realize that things have only gotten apocalyptically worse. There's no improvement. ~Chara

Surely that's incredibly unhealthy but evidence that #SoftwareEngineering is simply a wing of the "military-industrial complex" and there's a very good reason for continuing to use that phrase. It's not just a slogan or an Eisenhower quote. It's like the engine of #fascism, the source of drive.

It's quite simple, which is why it's so appealing. All human purpose is reduced to eternal war, which means that the only industries that need upkeep are those specifically geared to war abroad and repression at home. Why do anything else? It's "efficient", stripped down, single-purpose. ~Chara

That was always a sign that the illusion of infinite plenty offered by printing #cryptocurrency more or less--it really does seem as if the #technology and #software people, the elite crowd anyway, have convinced themselves that one can somehow just...create 'wealth' on a computer--was tainted. 🔴

The only social system that can possibly produce such an illusion of unbounded wealth is #fascism and its state of perpetual war, but war disguised by _distance_. The idea is: as long as there's a need to keep sending people and machinery to the front, at least that means "economic growth". ~Chara

I think it's safe to guess that the decision to weaponize #fission and especially Truman's decision to nuke Japan for no better reason than cornpone racism--something that I learned, ironically, from that page of Dave Sim's "Judenhass"--sealed the fate of the United States in terms of breakdown.

The United States has never had a very firm sense of national identity or character, which is a major reason why #fascism spread so readily here after the official end of the Second Great War. Trying to combine "nuclear peace" with the small-farm iconography...you could say Uncle Sam lost his mind.

It's just not possible. The U.S. had shattered its own "normalcy" and what we're now seeing in U.S. #politics is the last frenzied attempt to make that absurd dream work somehow. Virtual normalcy maybe! I've read of this. archive.org/details/dadd... Walter Jon Williams's "Daddy's World." ~Chara

It's a heartbreaking story about an errant father who puts an imprint of his son into a virtual world to to keep in stasis as it were, until the father can cure the child's ailments. It's a familiar trope. The father comes to value the cure more than the child, and he leaves the right way. ~Chara

It has to be *just right*, you see. Back the way it was. The relationship dissolves. The child is permanently estranged, comes to hate his father and then chooses to spend the rest of his life in the simulation as a tree. Just...contemplating. Except there's nothing to contemplate. Is there?

Meanwhile the father winds up in a simulation of his own, forever brooding on how his child had gone wrong on him. Maybe he'll try again you see. He's run into some very nice Jesus freaks who promise him a Heaven in a different simulation so now the father is there, wasting away. It's a bleak tale.

There's not a scrap of hope in this story. None. I don't know what Walter Jon Williams wanted to do with "Daddy's World" or what state of mind possessed him to write it, but I have never encountered, in my life, a more agonizing and protracted tale of despair. Father and child go to separate Hells.

That's what Hell is...stasis. That's why "cryosleep" is not actually kind even if it looks so neat and clean. Gosh it's not like they're *suffering* in a *cell* right? Great #police state thinking. That's always how they think. They imagine that there's some twisted kindness in being neat and tidy.

I...don't know how to write this next bit exactly. I wasn't aware that this story had burrowed so deep into my brain. I encountered it early in my Seattle life when I was trying to keep up some sort of relationship with the local sci-fi community. I remember some group...forget the name. ~Chara

It was a brief thing. I drifted away, we all drifted away I suppose. Seattle doesn't seem to be good for such things. There was no rancor or anything just...I vaguely recall a bit of conviviality with people I can't remember, watching "Galaxy Quest" together, and writing one book review. ~Chara

I don't think it went anywhere. I fired it off to whoever and I don't remember ever hearing about it again, but it was a review of an anthology called "Not of Woman Born" edited by Constance Ash and "Daddy's World" was the last story in it. What a finish huh? A big chunk of despair. I recall little.

I don't know what directions my thoughts went but...given my own serious daddy issues...probably not in good directions. But I will point out the following to M. @tobyfox.undertale.com. I do sense in this affair some pertinence. A strange inversion of #Undertale is in this Walter Jon Williams tale.

#Undertale might be construed as escaping from an underworld, or a simulation perhaps, although it's a kindly one and you can take your friends with you! "Daddy's World" is about the opposite, people who end up imprisoned in simulations. The father goes willingly, talked into some Jesusy bullshit.

What about the child, though? They decide they want nothing better than to be a tree in the simulation and fade away but...is that what really happens? Simulations don't just *fade*. We do know, from the story, that the father abandons the child. It's...quite upsetting. I will quote some. ~Chara

"Jamie had been loaded from an old backup—there was no point in using the corrupt file that Jamie had become, the one that had turned itself into a tree, for heaven's sake." Isn't that nice. The father now regards his child as "a corrupt file" and that makes it all better. Just data. Who cares.

So he starts all over again with a copy of Jamie when they were still happy and *not* estranged, because that's something you can do with sins, right? From Jamie's perspective their father had done something very cruel to them, deceiving them, and rather than deal the that the father just...snaps.

But through the miracle of #technology, which promises eternal #life (isn't that so @fchollet.bsky.social and @wang.social isn't that what all you darling cheeky accelerationists think you're getting from SEMICONDUCTORS IT'S MATTER IT'S NOT ETERNAL YOU FF anyway) in some virtual paradise... ~Chara

...the daydream of Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Bryan Johnson and everyone... If Walter Jon Williams meant "Daddy's World" as a cautionary tale about the dangers of this sort of thing then, well, I was very definitely warned off. I've always been horrified by this "virtual immortality" crap.

But there's a problem that I don't think Williams (oh another Williams) counted on, which was...I read the story. I do not have the sort of brain that is capable of letting go of stories. I feel as if I have to digest all of them, turn them over in my mind, satisfy myself as to my grasp of them.

And there's no breathing room in "Daddy's World". Not a tiny bit. The story is, ironically, too well written. If there were a fault in the fictional fabric my mind would have escaped through that. Seriously! That is how I interpret things. Take "The Terminator" for example. I've told this. ~Chara

Watching "The Terminator" I simply refuse to imagine that Lt. Traxler dies. I just don't. He's Paul Winfield! This...charming, amusing man, a familiar face in films. He gets shot in "The Terminator" and I've heard there's some cut scene where he's said to die but fuck that! On screen he doesn't. 🔴

I want to believe in Lt. Traxler, partly because he's got such a cool name (the surname of a chess player as I've said, and the name of a strange wild option for Black in the Two Knights Game). It's Paul Winfield and c'mon. He's a resilient guy, he'll pull through. Lance Henriksen is toast though.

There's an example of a tale with juuust enough wiggle-room. But "Daddy's World" has none and it just...I think it preyed on my mind in some strange way without my realizing it, because you know dissociation etc. And that would PERHAPS explain why playing "Undertale" for the first time was so... 🔴

...overwhelming. For it would seem that Walter Jon Williams's tale took up permanent residence in my headspace. Jamie trapped in their Hell as a tree, regarded as merely a "corrupt file" by their father, now in his Jesus-freak simulation. I really don't like #Christian computer programmers. ~Chara

I worked with one and it was unpleasant. I haven't worked it out completely but the contact between dead-end evangelical #Christianity and the false eternity of #software has surely been...extremely bad, and I'm a little scared about investigating the topic. It's bad enough in this one story. 🔴

In any case, M. @tobyfox.undertale.com, it seems we have a weird parallel. There's Jamie, a *tree* in one simulation. A plant. There's Daddy in the Jesus-freak simulation, "forever" "happy" with a copy of his kid, frozen at at earlier age before any unpleasantness turned up. You know how it is.

It's terrifying to think that a substantial fraction of humanity now thinks this sort of thing is a great idea, a vision for the future. #Optimism! So...is Jamie like Flowey? and is Daddy like W. D. Gaster? That's my question. Is that a sensible connection to make? I need to think about this. 🔴