The funny thing about that story is that its not supposed to be some sort of moral quandary, the suffering child isn’t the point at all. And that’s not subtext, the author straight up speaks directly to the reader and says its not the point.
And yet its practically the only thing I’ve ever heard people mention about it.
I think they meant to say superfluid helium.
I mean, if we’re making up a story about a kind of demon it probably shouldn’t be a healthy relationship.
A succubus sucks your soul out through your crotch, which feels great until it doesn’t. That’s why its supposed to be a scary monster.
The post says, “until you die of natural causes”, but for a counterpart to a succubus I think it would much more appropriate if it was able supernaturally influence you to reduce your worries and make you more and more dependent on it (just as a succubus can supernaturally charm its victims). Gradually you care about less and less as you lose all motivation, and at the end you don’t even bother to struggle as your soul is ripped from your body.
I remember the days when bugs in x86 CPUs were almost unheard of. The Pentium FDIV bug and the F00F bug were considered these unicorn things.
This is the case for a lot of inventions.
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
The author speaks directly to the reader about this:
She laments her inability to make Omelas seem like a real place, to convince the reader that such a society could actually exist, and invites the reader to try in her stead:
Finally, after some more description she again directly speaks to the reader to ask them if Omelas seems real:
When the answer is “no” they add the detail of the suffering child, which is necessary for all good things that occur there. How exactly torturing a child results in the city’s scholars being smart or ensuring good harvest is not explained at all, and yet by some narrative alchemy the setting is transmuted from something meaningless into something interesting.
The non-subtextual point of the story is that we as a people cannot imagine even a fictional setting without injustice. The subtextual point of the story is that we cannot imagine a society without injustice, fictional or not. Just as the people of Omelas described in the last section convince themselves that the injustice of their society is necessary, inevitable, and futile to fight against, so to do we convince ourselves that the injustices of our society are the same way. And yet there is some hope offered in the titular ones who walk away:
The author admits that she herself cannot imagine “the kind of place they’re going to”, in other words the kind of society that is not based on exploitation but is not an impossible utopia like the Omelas described in the first section something that could exist in the real world (it seems the author failed to convince even herself). Nevertheless these people who are not her “seem to know where they are going”. This is an invitation to the reader to try to do what she couldn’t by herself: figure out how to structure such a society.
So, you can see what I mean when I say that its funny that this story that laments our inability to engage with anything but suffering and exploitation, is engaged with almost exclusively by talking about the mechanics and moral implications of the suffering that it uses as an example of this very tendency.