My brother is one of the actors on this show.

This brings me absolutely no inside knowledge or wisdom, but a great deal of pleasure when somebody brings it up on a rationalist message board.

I have started drawing ponies. They are fun and easy to draw. If anyone wants a pony version of emself (or of someone or something else), ask me (samples of the ponies I have already drawn will be publicly available soon once they've been scanned and colored).

The "Feeling Pinkie Keen" episode may be fun to analyze from a rationalist/Bayesian perspective. Was Twilight Sparkle being rational to jump based on Pinkie Pie's sense at the end? What would have to be the priors at the beginning of the episode for it to be the correct decision at the end, after all the accumulated evidence? :-)

That show doesn't need a "Rational" fanfic: it's pretty rational all by itself. In fact, the characters go more intelligently about their problems and drama than most characters in fiction, even adult fiction.

This is actually a social commentary.

Ok, I've downloaded and played it. Absolutely mindblowing! The learning curve is through the roof and there is just so much of it to learn. It simulates just about everything a dwarven world should have. The development of a single individual citizen is far more complex than most roleplaying games have for their protagonist - even down to getting attached to a specific weapon (object, not class!)

The way the community defines 'Fun' is amusing too. It seems to involve the forcible discovering new ways to be utterly obliterated. Unfortunately I haven't had much 'fun' yet even with a respectable civilization going along. But that's because I did a lot of research on the low to mid skill level risks and worked damn hard to prevent them - quite a challenge and fun in itself.

I play this. It's definitely a game where having a rationality-focused outlook is helpful, and my impression is that it's useful for learning rationality as well.

Dwarf Fortress is in some ways a ridiculously complicated game, and it's also an alpha and thus buggy. It's not always easy to determine what's a poorly-communicated feature and what's a bug. Experimentation (or ‼SCIENCE‼, as it's often called on the forums) is useful in figuring out the difference. Quirks tend to be more emergent than arbitrary, so while there's a degree of password-guessing, doing so is not nearly as useful as it is in some games. Also, the traits that the quirks emerge from are not always immediately obvious (and in rare cases, not communicated at all without third-party software), so part of the process is figuring out which things are even relevant factors at all.

It also supports a wide range of play styles, including ones that involve doing very little experimentation at all. I don't recommend it, though, for anyone who has significant trouble imagining things in three dimensions or parsing dense fields of symbols.

I strongly recomend the lazy newb pack to anyone who's interested in the game - it bundles the basic software with several extremely useful third-party utilities, including Dwarf Therapist, which is essentially necessary to play a fort with more than 40 or 50 dwarves in it.

I strongly recommend Kiln People. On the other hand, Heart of the Comet should be avoided.

In particular, the first three titles are - unusually - in increasing order of quality, so if you tried Sundiver and it didn't blow you away, try Startide Rising and/or The Uplift War anyway.

'Children of the Sky', sequel to 'A Fire Upon the Deep' and thus 'A Deepness in the Sky', comes out on October 15th, and the excerpts so far have been promising.

I just started Fire Upon the Deep yesterday. It's confusing, and I don't know why so many people seem to like it. I'm not really having fun because I don't know what's going on and I can't keep anything or anyone straight. The plot threads have no obvious connection to each other and the author seems to be having way too much fun tantalizing me with incomplete worldbuilding details. I'm up to page 109: someone tell me what makes the other 500 pages worth reading, please.

Themes of interest for LessWrongers:

• free will
• superhumanity and value drift
• utilitarianism (Adrian) vs deontology (Rorcshach)
• joy of merely real

NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE (as far as I can tell)

Here you go.

Ok, made a proper top level comment for this. Would you mind deleting this one and put the content as a child to that instead?

Voted down for not following the proper template, things like themes should be discussed in the child post, and you forgot BOTH the links.

Edit: Why was this dowvoted? And the post it comments on not fixed? Are people opposed to threads with some actual structure and being committed to punish defection from that structure that is harmful to the thread at large?

I watched this in the year prior to learning about the Singularity. There are many places where it is, of course, optimized for awesomness instead of scientific accuracy. But one thing that impressed me a lot is that the robot characters have honest to goodness character development that is based on them being robots. (As compared to most other shows and stories, where the robots magically get human feelings and then are just developed like regular people with occasional straw-vulcan tendencies)

There's approximately four main robot characters, each of which obviously has a different utility function which shapes their morality and their relationships.

The great thing about it is that because of Time Travel, it completely erases the events of Terminator 3 and 4 and replaces them with a much more interesting series of events and better character development (for both humans and nonhumans).

The show is designed to be faithful to Terminator 2 in particular. (If you watch the director's cut of it and then begin watching the show, you'll pick up on a lot of storytelling techniques that are re-used and expanded upon)

Homestuck is an amazing example of what you can do with the web format. Flash animations, high quality music, and an intensely intricate plot with strong characterization and stable time loops (and some unstable ones) are just a few of the awesome things that Homestuck has. Andrew Hussy is a uniquely talented individual. Doesn't hurt that he updates with extreme regularity either.

Themes of interest for LessWrongers:

• free will
• superhumanity and value drift
• utilitarianism (Adrian) vs deontology (Rorcshach)
• joy of merely real

Of interest: despite the frequent Straw Vulcans, the p-zombie crap of DADOES, and the religious weirdness of VALIS and forth (which I enjoy, but some here might find disagreeable). Dick always proceeded to use skepticism and humanism on any idea of his, and was never satisfied with reality just because others told him it works for now.

Why this is for Less Wrong readers: it discusses what it means to be human in an interesting way. Whether it's true to the experience of people with multiple personalities or not, I don't really care. It is, in a sense, an example of genuinely alien aliens.

Why this is for Less Wrong readers:

... turns out I can't get the formatting to work for some reason. it works without it but if someone would link me to a guide things'd get easier to read...