Venture

The entire field of postmodernism?

And the problem is that it's not any of those things, particularly in running continuities.

Only fix I even remotely care about.

I gave out lots when reviewing MA arcs (now a pointless activity). Others are distributed in various places, but they're there.

Actually I find it easier to do so in person, when reasonable opportunity presents itself.

We're not. We can see the flaws from way out here in the nosebleed section.

We already have. It hasn't.

Moff's Law

a) Are you footing the bill? b) You don't have to lay an egg to criticize an omelet. Oh and c) many players have written better content in AE.

If they weren't wrong so often we wouldn't have to correct them so much.

Naturally you will determine what those contexts are, right?

This is the previous complaint wearing a funny hat.

A glass of water that was full five minutes ago and is half-full now is different from two glasses of water, one full and one half-full.

Arcanaville has explained it from a more formal perspective which is out of context; the original has to do with sets of beliefs and philosophy of science. All of a person's beliefs form an interconnected web. It is possible to add any new belief to the web no matter how contradictory if one is willing to deform the rest of the web sufficiently. That's (unintentionally; wasn't what Quine or Duhem were writing about) what powers postmodernism in a nutshell; if you're willing to embrace any amount of nonsense you can believe anything. Arcanaville's interpretation (truth is dependent on context) is coming at it from a different angle but arrives at basically the same place.

In your example, the degenerate solution is to add "Wednesday and Thursday are interchangeable" to the mix. Is this complete nonsense? <bison>OF COURSE!</bison> So what?

But even conceding that the example is irreconcilable doesn't get you anywhere really. The only types of inconsistencies you're willing to admit could exist in a story are the kind of childish mistakes that a proofreader would (or at least should) catch. If a writer oh, I don't know, says vampires can't have kids and then in the next book has a vampire knock up the lead babe, according to you this isn't inconsistent or bad writing as long as she can handwave it, and she'll always be able to do so. Your position admits of only the most trivial of objections and thus can be safely dismissed as an unreasonable criterion.

No, it's one timeline with two different states.

Given earlier in the thread. Keep up.

There is only one timeline; the characters met for the first time on Thursday and then the timeline was reset and they met for the first time on Wednesday. No inconsistency, so what if the novel was really a rom-com with no fantastic elements, obviously the Villain of Another Story mucking things up on the sidelines....

Quine says you can and he's (or was, sadly) smarter than you. (Your argument, by the way, is an example of the Duhem-Quine Thesis at work. )

Time travel.

A formal system that contains A and ¬A is inconsistent but stories (or belief structures) are not formal systems. You can always bend a story to accommodate contradictions; it's just a question of how many porcupines your audience is willing to swallow.

A "true inconsistency" then never exists by this definition, because any inconsistency can be handwaved if you're willing to swallow enough codswallop. This is the point.

The article reads as though the author has never even heard of H. P. Lovecraft (though the followup appears to contradict that). Prometheus is at its heart a remake of At The Mountains of Madness; critiquing it as he did is akin to evaluating a rom-com as if it were a Western (perhaps because someone wore a cowboy hat).

As for the points about Calvinball storytelling in general, I agree for the most part, particularly:

The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually do this. Anyone with an eye for detail can tell when the writers have drawn Schrodinger's Gun. Some amount of that is necessary just to deal with real life contingencies but as some dead white guy said "plans are useless; planning is indispensable". In making Babylon 5 JMS got away with some Calvinball-esque moves because he knew at every step of the way where he was, where he had been, where he was going, and how he got where he was and intended to get where he was going. It is orders of magnitude easier to make changes in that kind of known framework than it is to throw random crap at the wall one day to the next and hope for the best.

Two words: Voodoo Shark.

Slick and Arcana have already done a good job here. But just off the top of my head:

Blueberry says that Ascension robs the postulant's race of much of its potential. But if the same source of potential or "Well" as we're calling it applies to all members of a given race across multiple universes then doesn't it have to have infinite potential? There are infinite alternate universes and any finite supply divided across infinity would come to nothing. If it's infinite then why would Ascension matter? You can subtract any amount from infinity, uh, infinitely.

But let's go with the idea that potential is finite. Doesn't that make every one of our characters a selfish jerk? For one to become superhuman, how many others must be consigned to mediocrity or worse because their share of potential has been taken? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? Who, who would call themselves "hero", would accept such power at such a price? And yet, of course, our characters are cast by the Incarnate lore as chomping at the bit to gain MOAR POWER, even making obvious Faustian bargains with a clearly malevolent entity to do so.

It is obvious by any reasonable accounting that the Well and Incarnate lore have been and continue to be cobbled together on the fly to fit the convenience of the moment. There is a term for this. It's also obvious that the implications are considered lightly if at all. Sometimes that's forgivable. This being a roleplaying game, and the material in question being intimately tied to how people conceive and perceive their alternate selves, it isn't. That's over and above that fact that it's a just plain bad story.

N.B. that it's not a question of whether or not the inconsistencies can be reconciled. Of course they can be. I keep trotting this out but only because it's true: there's a thing in philosophy called the Duhem-Quine Thesis which basically states in layman's terms that if you try hard enough you can BS yourself into believing anything. If you're willing to toss anything resembling reason and sanity to the winds you can explain the Well lore using the political structure of the Ottoman Empire. The problem is that you need to come up with these kinds of absurd explanations.

N.B. also: Moff's Law.

I know. You're welcome.

It is not merely inconsistent but it makes absolutely no sense on any level when examined closely. It's a great example of an ad hoc attempt to explain things that didn't need explaining and weren't really connected in the first place.

Merulina is dead, per Vincent Ross' arc. Best guess as to what killed her is a Nictus, possibly Arakhn or Dirge of Shadow.

Really? I got one of the codes and couldn't for the life of me tell what it did. The costume creator was the one place I didn't think to look....

...to the bat-login, old chum!

It reduces the issue to a silly use of writers' prerogative.

The problem is that the circumstances are important.