A Nuclear Machine That Heats Space

Reminiscing about the silliness that was Chungian Paranoia Combat in Exalted 2e, and the context for it. Long story of niche interest.

i see no difference ~

(original)

transparent below, in case you want to use any other flag:

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year's winner - these candidates are young lovers forced to compete - he's smart - she's fast - root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they're in...a forest.

it's not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making "survival by hiding" an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it's a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what's happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what's going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they're intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn't even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i'm designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don't know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children's murder arenas at all.

why is this about to make me sob

a poem i am sure everyone has seen but i'm still going to share anyway

as well as this other poem inspired by giovanni's

and this beautiful tweet

Hmm, and what happens to those who enter your home?

What happens to those who enter your home, spider?

We've apparently invented an artificial stone that, when cut, functions as a kind of Super Asbestos.

So, you know, watch out for that.

Nononono silica dust is a known and common hazard in construction and manufacturing. This is deliberate and horrifying neglect on the part of these employers. They could have properly implemented engineering controls, they could have required respirators on the shop floor. What you call "super asbestos" (silica dust) has been killing people for centuries, as long as people have been stonemasons really. OSHA has strict standards regarding the PEL for silica dust, but there is a dangerous lack of awareness and enforcement of safety protocols. This is not some new horror of the culture of capitalism, this is ordinary and awful and age old neglect.

The only people arguing that this is "ordinary" are the manufactures of engineered stone, who are making the same "well, companies should just enforce better PPE use" argument in their defense.

But the allegations against engineered stone are that it's worse than previous sources of silicosis, even to the point that ordinary protection isn't enough. From the article,

"In Australia, where the government is weighing whether to ban engineered stone, a professional group whose members assess worker health hazards concluded that the high concentration of silica in engineered stone makes it difficult for measures such as wet cutting and ventilation to adequately protect workers."

I haven't done any deep research into whether that's true or not beyond what's in this report, but you're completely reducing the entire issue to "just use normal protections, this new material is no big deal". No, the material appears to be an issue in itself. Even people already following standard safety measures should be aware of it.

And even if it were true that there are field-practical safety precautions that would nullify the issue (obviously if you cut something with a remotely operated water saw in a negative-pressure HEPA enclosure then you'll be fine, but many construction materials are sized on site), there is still the Hierarchy of Controls:

Eliminating or substituting with a less hazardous analog is generally preferable to upgrading PPE or engineered controls to compensate, if practical. And then having done so, you can still just also use water saws and wear PPE for the less-but-still hazardous substitute.

Saw this on twitter honestly loosing my mind over it.

https://x.com/mekklord/status/1778678608543752285

Today I learned that there's a specific name for those floral-looking typographic widgets which are used to indicate a break or omission in a body of text, and you may be surprised to learn what that name is.

If the dinkus looks like a little leaf or something, it's more specifically a fleuron! A dinkus can also be simpler, like the line of three asterisks in the Wikipedia preview above.

It's a bit misleading to say that it's "more specifically" a fleuron. A typographic element can be both a dinkus and a fleuron, but a fleuron is not a kind of dinkus; there are also fleurons which are not dinkuses (and vice versa).

This conversation reminds me of the class hierarchy in Starcraft:

"History tells us that programmers feel compelled to try every feature of their new language during the first project, and so it was with class inheritance in StarCraft. Experienced programmers will shudder when seeing the inheritance chain that was designed for the game’s units:

CUnit < CDoodad < CFlingy < CThingy

CThingy objects were sprites that could appear anywhere on the game map, but didn’t move or have behaviors, while CFlingys were used for creating particles; when an explosion occurred several of them would spin off in random directions. CDoodad — after 14 years I think this is the class name — was an uninstantiated class that nevertheless had important behaviors required for proper functioning of derived classes. And CUnit was layered on top of that. The behavior of units was scattered all throughout these various modules, and it required an understanding of each class to be able to accomplish anything."

~Source

I don't really want to wade into the whole Thing but I think if people who haven't listened to rap before want to dip their toes in the water via white people rap about video games* that's Fine Actually, whatever element of familiarity can help you start to listen to a new genre is still getting you to listen to it. Once you start to build up an appreciation of the form, you won't need those training wheels. Learning to appreciate new genres can be hard, and if you're yelling at people for not wanting to jump immediately to content they find more artistically intimidating I think that maybe you care more about calling people racist on the internet than about actually getting people into new kinds of art.

*(or Hamilton! Hamilton contains a lot of homages to genre classics; listening to Hamilton and then delving into its musical inspirations would be a fine way to go about it)

I think we need to get even worse faith about this actually. I think we need to find increasingly niche and artistically intimidating musical genres to call people racist for not listening to. Not for any particular reason, just to increase the amount of suffering in the world.

Alternatively, just flip the script and get really confrontational about why tumblr users aren't listening to Japanese rap :/ just don't like Japanese people huh :/ :/ :/

x

Glorb has done more to get people into drill rap than any number of guilt-trips ever could.

Interview with the founding lead dev of Kerbal Space Program, in light of the apparent closure of the studio that was building KSP 2.

There was a recent post by someone I follow, tho I can't find it now, that said the only way to even really improve on modded KSP is with new game engine, to address the fundamental issues that can't be fixed any other way. But in this respect, it seems the original creator wouldn't have been much better, as they dismiss the possibility of a better version being possible or practical, and wouldn't have been interested in such a project anyway.

Which is unfortunate, but not unsympathetic. The interviewer referred to KSP as "his baby", but when the only logical next step is to pivot from game dev to spending years doing novel engine work on fixed-point physics or poly-centric floating point coordinate systems, I can understand if the father starts to ask, "but what if the baby has bad vibes tho?"

Addendum: I seem to have underestimated what is possible to do with KSP mods. (But when your distributing .dlls, is that really a mod, or is that a straight-up fork?)

Maybe even the hypothetical Good Version of KSP 2 truly is a pointless project.

Edit: Well, no, the point would be to "take all of the best concepts from mods and consolidate them into a coherent, supported whole." But that still runs into the original creators issue with "having to remake 10 years worth of community development just to re-achieve the status quo."