A man who is ostensibly a writer cannot express himself verbally and must use images created by others.

Also it's really telling how you couldn't bear to reply to Reid's criticism of your work, but pinching off a brown loaf of a critique of someone else's work was apparently life goal #1 after getting unbanned.

For those too dense to "get it" -- the statue is Cain by Henri Vidal, and I posted it because of:

1) Jon'C's screams for MORE PHILOSOPHY (it does somewhat looks like a much more famous statue by Rodin, doesn't it?)

An alcoholic, a mentally unstable person, and a narcissistic fool walk into a bar ...

The only thing that bothered me in you people banning me for disliking you lot

I'm procrastinating

I'm not really planning on doing anything with the Punk Girl story either, making it again a waste of my time

I am not a solipsist

I really do not care what Jon'C and his fan club thinks of me.

"We" were the ones who unbanned you.

Gypsies?

ROMANI, you racist scum, ROMANI!

PS. And you are an educated fool to whom some very confused people look up to even in matters you've very little practical knowledge about because apparently you have some rudimentary programming skills, know a professor or two,

and (I assume) badmouth people in the MASSCHATs a lot.

Perhaps you should leave.

Except, you know what? I don't actually want you to leave.

And somehow Koobie is proving he's not racist by posting a Japanese caricature of a just pretending to be Romani con-artist as his proof?

That is Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, who described herself as Romani in the cult classic anime series. She was just pretending? I'm re-watching the series now (well, kind of, I really don't have that much time), didn't know she was pretending.

Jon'C, I've once said I drank a bottle of Tokaj on an evening off ...

for you, it means I have a problem.

The stress in "educated fool" was not on educated, Joncey. It was on fool​. Fool.

That is actually exactly what I just posted. You just don't read anything before replying, or at least understand it.

Our eyes remained focused, it was now a battle of will, I had to force them to stay down, and with all my might I pressed.

Who are we? Who am I? Is my eyes remaining focused a problem?

How did I force my eyes to stay down? Or is it not my eyes whom I'd forced to stay down?

>>I forced their sorry body into the planks, preventing them from any motion.

Whose sorry body?

>>By this time I had a suspicion, I was almost sure it was Gylsahm, but I needed to continue; out of principle. I could see a fragment of his eye peering at me, and within it's murky fire I saw a twitch of fear.

In whose eye?
**** suspense, dude, I want to know what's going on.

Identity matters. In brief the issue I have is that you're trying to make specific statements about specific but indiscernible things over an uncountably infinite group generated from a continuous probability distribution. I agree with the axiom of choice in a mathematical sense but I don't agree you can construct a deterministic universe out of a non-deterministic one in this way. The total energy of a branch must be infinitesimal, and in order to choose a single branch you'd need to know things about particles that you can't know.

But why does identity matter? What bearing does it have on the thought experiment, other than the language used to describe it?

That is actually exactly what I just posted. You just don't read anything before replying, or at least understand it.

Reid, I'd expanded my original reply in post #273. You do not have to explain to me how I'm too ****ty a reader to have failed to understand wtf is going on in your prose. Simply take whatever advise you find useful, if you find it useful / decide to use it / understand it, and discard the rest. I even re-wrote one line for you, I'm not going to re-write the entire thing just to demonstrate what I meant by everything I've said in that post, sorry to say. This is why I don't like to respond to crits I may not agree with (neither do most people who value their time and sanity), but I'll get to it. Perhaps you think I've missed the important parts and concentrated on what is irrelevant, or at least so you say, but if you know all the flaws in your story already, why haven't you fixed it yet?
Peace & luvs,
K.

Here is my original reply, expanded:

>>Our eyes remained focused, it was now a battle of will, I had to force them to stay down, and with all my might I pressed.

This sentence alone demonstrates you are an amateur. Please do not take it as an offense. Perhaps it will win you accolades in the Literary School of Jon'C (Jon'C, please *do* take it as an offense, you narcissistic twerp), but from reading this sentence I do not know whose eyes remain focused. I do not know who "we" are. I do not know on what our eyes are focusing, or why it is important. You have a conflict (sort of), but you have no characters. When you say "I had to foce them to stay down" it is unclear for me who did the MC have to force to stay down? His eyes? His buddies, whose eyes are also focused?

>>I forced their sorry body into the planks, preventing them from any motion.

Many people but one body? Also, I have no sense of setting. Where is the action taking place? Not to mention ... who are these "they"?

>>By this time I had a suspicion, I was almost sure it was Gylsahm, but I needed to continue; out of principle.

The body belonged to Gylsahm? Also, what did the MC have to continue doing, focusing his eyes, forcing "them" to stay down (?), or pushing the sorry body into the planks? How can a body be sorry? How is pushing anything into wooden planks any good?

>>Indeed I was truly in control at this point, although it did not evoke happiness, instead it made me feel miserable.

If you want your readers to feel for your characters, don't say they are miserable. Show us their thoughts, explain that burning feeling in their dry throats and they search for the rights words to tell to their friends when they ask them what's up and fail, etc.

>>My jaw muscles lost their tenseness, and in that instant, I felt myself thrown backwards and my neck clamped, the very thing I had done to him was not being done to me.

"I felt myself thrown backwards" is passive. Who or what threw the MC backwards? What had he done to him (presumably, Gylsahm, who is now a sorry body)?

>>As I remained held down I could only feel fright and confusion, why would he do this to me?

Again, passive sentence struction & telling & no clear sense of what's going on. Again, the "he" is the sorry body?

At this point I've finished reading the first pargaraph, and I still have no idea of what is going on apart from a very faint notion that the story might deal with shapeshifters of one sort or another.

>>I placed my palm upon my jugular, crying to nature for forgiveness and redemption, to heal myself. Nature agreed with my final request, and soon natural energies flowed from within my hands to the injuries placed upon my delicate body.

What is this, "crying to nature?"

How about, "I put one hand on my throat and screamed a silent scream, sucking in the energies around me. It wasn't easy, but I've done it, somehow, I've done it; the pain was as intoleratable as ever, and yet I'd felt my wounds slowly close one by one, flesh mending flesh, as nature answered my desperate plea." Or something like that.

>>His neck bore similar to mine, and yet although my wounds were healed, seeing his made the pain come more intensely than they had before.

Bore wounds similar to mine? How can the MC see the enemy's pain if the enemy is asleep? Why is he asleep, anyway, didn't they just have a fight?

>>I fell forward, plunging my face into his blood, asking nature for the final time to heal, to prevent his potential suffering.

Two paragarphs in, and I still have no idea what's going on. What potential suffering?

Reid, you've mentioned you had some mental issues in this thread previously I believe, but you seem to be able to formulate sentences quite well in your posts; you should be able to do the same when writing fiction.

Simply find a book or two that you really like, and try to see, sentence by sentence, what the authors did -- and how they did it. See how characters come to life (usually because of a conflict or a change, whether internal or external), see how settings are described, and so on. And don't let me discourage you. Practice is everything.

Cheerio.

You never asked for context. The passage is confusing without context.

Please do not take my criticism of what you wrote as an attack on yourself.

I never asked you for anything. I never asked you to crit my work, I never asked you to give me yours to crit. This is all a giant waste of my time, and I only tolerate it because ... I don't know. I'm just a special kind of crazy, I guess. I did not want to offend you, Reid. I really liked the dub music you've posted.

Please do not take my criticism of what you wrote as an attack on yourself. Please do not take it as me trying to look good in the eyes of Jon'C. I have written many more crits than I've written stories. And I've written a lot of stories. Some of these crits helped people. Some of them didn't.

It is okay you disagree with what I have to say. It is okay it is an excerpt, but I still want to know what's going on when I'm reading something, excerpt or not ... em. Anyway.

People.

Please.

Start being reasonable.

What does it mean to talk about specific things happening in specific branches without identity?

I'm trying to point out that your thought experiment is facile; yes, you can construct a deterministic system out of stochastic outcomes and talk about individual 'nodes', but only because the random events themselves still have a clear, independent cause even if the outcomes are uncertain. In our universe this isn't necessarily true, and our freaky form of causation means that a person in a particular branch (if we can even talk about such things) is in a superposition of both admitting and contradicting the indiscernibility of identicals. dis shi cray.

A physicalist position would state that Bob's subjective consciousness is made up of neurological impulses, and does not carry any intrinsic Bob-ness from moment to moment any more than from original to copy.

Let's say that two copies of Bob are created instead of just one, Bob2h in front of a coin set heads-up, and Bob2t in front of a coin set tails-up. Even if this took place in a completely deterministic universe without the limitations on measurement that come with quantum physics, there is nothing Bob1 could have done to predict which coin "he" would see afterwards (since both Bob2t and Bob2h would remember the same prediction), unless it is also a dualistic universe and Bob somehow has knowledge of what intrinsic identities do in these situations.

I don't follow what you are trying to say with "a superposition of both admitting and contradicting the indiscernibility of identicals".

The way you reacted when Jon`C started criticizing your writing (and it was still constructive).