In the Halls of the Mountain Kings
lapsuslima.com
lapsuslima.com
bunjywunjy:
> yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had
> a short training article on recognizing computer-generated
> faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was
> “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both
> ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly
> cycled right back to IF YE MEET A MAN ON THE ROAD, COUNT
> HIS FINGERS LEST YE DEAL UNKNOWING WITH A FAE
If you keep the "fae = buggy AI" correspondence in mind and read the third paragraph from the article, the description starts making perfect sense. All the variation, all the odd behavior. For example, "meting out disproportionate punishment for trivial offences" sounds a lot like automated bans.
Perhaps we should start re-appropriating mythical terms for new tech. It's much easier to explain the dangers of AI-controlled weapons, for example, if you word it as "hiring armed fae".
Overall this website's design is amazing, all of it is simple and elegant.
I'm no expert but I've always loved my books set in them.
> Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.
In anime you see ghosts and talk about ghosts all the time (telling ghost stories around the fire, or somebody who got a house cheap because it was thought to be haunted, or the giant robot cops who seem to help ghosts go to rest as often as they put criminals behind bars)
The mythology and nature of the stories doesn't seem very different from western ghost stories but the prevalence seems higher. It seems to me that Buddhist mythology is as compatible with stray spirits sticking around just as much as Christian mythology except that Christians see souls moving on a one-way track on a 1000 year time scale where Bhuddists see them going across multiple worlds, heavens and hells over more of a trillion+ year time scale. Either way a few might be so attached to this world they get stuck for a few tens of hundreds of years.
Possibly because fairy stories come from primarily animist and polytheistic cultures. In Christian cosmology, everything not human either explicitly serves God or Satan - outside the material world, as either angel or demon, black or white. But faeries can be good and evil, like humans, and they suggest a third "grey" order of supernatural domain (that of nature itself.) They can inhabit a world which is not our world, but also neither Heaven, nor Hell. Christianity cosmology doesn't really have room for that kind of ambiguity.