Thursday, July 06, 2023

Disclosure of Motivations

Remember how I’ve been trying to pass variants on Issuing NPC Pronoun Permits for a while, to restrict or eliminate the pronoun replacement clause in “Spelling and formatting”? My actual motivation was to stop an extremely broad gamebreaking scam.

“E” is a spivak pronoun. It also happens to be a recurring feature of other words. So if I wanted, I could turn, say, “introspection” into “introsptheyction” to yank the rug out from under anyone memeing in level 3. Or, recursively, “introspththththeyyyyction” to make the point that it’s deliberate mutilation and not a typo that can be corrected using the same rule. Obviously, this breaks the game rather thoroughly when applied to general ruletext rather than quoted flavortext. I therefore didn’t want to reveal the full reason for the fix until after it was fixed, though I eventually passed it by disclosing a watered-down version.

Comments

lemon: she/her

06-07-2023 01:23:29 UTC

oh my goodness! that’s… very alarming. i’m glad it’s fixed now :-0

Josh: he/they

06-07-2023 07:24:59 UTC

I don’t think that’s a real problem, not least because the letter ‘e’ in the middle of a word is not a Spivak or gender-specific pronouns - words need contexts, they’re not simply created by a coincidence of letters clashing in the wild, cf swear-blockers censoring the name of the town Scunthorphe. But I also don’t think the fix broke anything so oh well.