Sandbox Discussions

[Alicorn]

Elspeth's magic patches some of that; it gives the explanation of the concept she wants to get across that the recipient needs. She does have to manually decide what concepts to push, though, and has not put as much effort into that as Mirelótë did. Elspeth could probably get Valar to competent status faster than Mirelótë did but the Silmaril peal kind of... personally dislikes the Valar as a group with a handful of grudging exceptions, expects it's a values difference, and can get most of what they want elsewise. So she hasn't put in the effort. Mirelótë learned a lot about them and went at their pace and found opportunities for them to practice and didn't Loudly Disapprove Of Them whenever they interacted.

[DanielH]

How much difference does the Loud Disapproval make (in terms of the Valar learning, not in terms of how much time/effort Elspeth put in)? It would make a large difference for humanlike psychology but it doesn’t seem like it would affect nearly as much for the Valar.

[lintamande]

They don't have the 'it is unpleasant to interact with people who don't like you' thing but they do have 'if someone is radiating that they consider our values incompatible, then their arguments are more dismissible on the grounds of 'well, we don't share that value'' thing.I don't know that Elspeth could sell 'the fact Eru makes people able to make choices is an argument for having your preferences about their end-states be path-dependent' thing because it's not Elspeth's real reason and Elspeth considers it a kind of bullshit reason and Elspeth would not be able to hide it.

[Kappa]

Man, this *really* makes me want to have a Libby or a Miles or someone in that genre find and talk to some Valar. For five thousand years apparently. XDDDDD

[DanielH]

We are very close to an interesting milestone in glowfic: confirmation of a world which Milliways cannot access and/or multiple Milliwayses throughout the multiverse. This only hasn’t happened yet because the “nobody deserves…” Arda might have been several thousand years earlier in room of requirement.

Asimov (well, one of his characters) said that the number 2 is impossible and can’t exist. I would extend that to saying that zero and especially one are highly suspect. Alicorn once said that there is only one Milliways, and we’re close to having that disproven. So far it does seem that there is only one Breakroom, but we’ve only seen it once and only briefly, so that doesn’t really mean much.

The only number you can really be sure of is infinity.

[Alicorn]

I think it is important to distinguish between multiple Milliways in the multiverse and multiple Milliways in groups of several continuities.

[DanielH]

[I edited my previous post because I didn’t expect anybody to have read it so soon; your response is still relevant]

Sure, and it might be conceptually impossible for multiple Milliwayses to interact (at least until the multiverse changes/you decide for some reason that it actually might be interesting to write that), but it’s interesting that they can’t even see the same set of worlds. Eru can see worlds in other continuities.

[Moriwen]

Or Bar does not in fact have perfect information about the worlds Milliways can access.

[DanielH]

Or at least not the ones it is not accessing. Presumably she has information about any that are currently relevant.

[futurevision]

Midnight with cotton candy Elves makes me so nervous >.>