keepcarrot

Thinking of writing a fan fiction that's been on my mind for a while. I know some people dive right in and write in a very linear fashion, but I generally feel that I'm better at the overarching stuff and worse at maintaining character voice.

Idek if I'd post it anywhere, this is mostly to get a pile of ideas out of my head.

(I guess when I say "start writing", I mean putting down sentences that would plausibly wind up as part of the prose, but it's all writing really)

Under this picture was a thread where someone asked why anyone would be motivated by such a thing. They had a lot of responses that wanted to defend the sentiment of "enriching shareholders", but seemingly unable to even make a relevant point, let alone an incorrect or poor reason.

So, I play a lot of grand strategies and city builders. My proposal is we play one collectively Week by week. The thread gets used as a committee to make decisions, and then I play for 4 or 5 hours or until the thread's decisions have been actioned (or a big decision happens).

I'll take care of the minor nitty gritty of the game, and come back with a report or something.

I'm thinking something like Victoria 3 or Stellaris or Tropico. Could do rimworld or something. More complex games will require more interpretation and slower game play on my part.

Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?

Hexbear started during the 2020 BLM protests, where cops were using social media and internet presence to track down activists. They are still doing this, but with less vigor than when police stations were burning down.

This included things like using tattoos on naked bodies, etsy store receipts etc.

Just before the r/cth ban, there was also a problem with chasers and leering objectification, and steps were taken to reduce thirst-posting and the like.

These things combined means that people don't post selfies or direct identifying information. People post their pets and artwork, but I know I have to make a decision about where and when I post things to make things non-trivial for cops or random chuds. I feel like a unique pet name, breed, and rough region could be enough to track someone down.

Even so, I think I'm bad at it. I feel like if someone knew me and read everything on hexbear they could ID me pretty easily (and I know multiple people in person on hexbear, but we've never exchanged usernames).

Idk if there are any hard and fast rules beyond the selfies and direct ID though. I should burn this account.

Edit: removed reference to masculinity

Making a tank in Stormworks. I've programmed the regenerative braking, which is quite simple. It is very effective on a tank, since it uses brakes for steering and 50 tons has a lot of energy to store.

How the motor should work in response to driver inputs, saving the engine (due to low RPMs), and smoothing out the power delivery... More complex.

The engine has enough power to accelerate pretty well, but diesel engines disadvantage in tanks compared to turbines is that the jet can deliver very high torque, allowing (say) an Abrams or T80 to accelerate from stationary much faster than their diesel equivalents. Thus, hybrid tank.

Main cases:

• starter. Probably the simplest case, the motor gives power until the diesel gets to ignition
• Saving the engine from stalling: keeps the RPMs above ignition until the engine's controller catches up to the situation. Needs a safety cut-off in case something is jammed to prevent damage.
• driver wants to accelerate. WS controls, should turn off when clutch is disengaged for gear changing (no torque converters, sorry)
• sudden dips in RPMs when there is no driver input. Sudden hills, rougher terrain. Not to prevent the RPM from going down entirely, but to provide smooth running while going over rough terrain.

One thing I am finding is that the diesel engine is very hard to tune if I do any of these, so I should probably do that first before doing anything but the starter case.

The motor on its own can rolling start the tank pretty well

Song about being "asked" to "move" by settlers

Emails: permanent written record I can refer to later

Can reply in my own time

Low labour

Low resource use

Phone call: Times/dates mentioned will be forgotten often

Active demand of time

I don't pick up because that phone number looks weird but also my phone's vibrate function is weak

High labour

High data cost per information

My shrink's office seems to want to keep billing information and past/present appointments secret. (This also seems to be worse in local industry, everything has to be a meeting instead of a two line email)

Not that it was good or there for good reasons, but it seems to happen quite rarely (say, shovelling weapons into Israel or whatever is not even tangentially on the ballot)

A reply someone sent to me a while ago that annoyed me enough to respond. The vibe I got was: “Dune Spice Wars is just a palette swap of Northgard” with the implication that the devs are lazy and greedy for developing a game that is extremely similar to their previous game (asset flipping, I guess).

I hadn’t played Northgard at the time, but did watch the trailer. Northgard was on sale recently, so I gave it a shot after having played a bunch of Spice Wars.

Because this has bitten me in the ass a few times on hexbear, here’s a short list of things I’m not arguing in this post: Game Publishers aren’t using DLCs or low effort new games games as low labour sources of profit. Obviously, this is the case. Artist and programmer hours down, IP rent up is endemic to the games industry. The devs are “good”. I actually have no idea, I just think this particular charge was unwarranted. Dune: Spice Wars or Northgard are good. Idk, I’ve enjoyed at least one of them These are the two most different games, nay, nouns in human history. They are not. Idk why, but in my region of the world “completely different” gets used for “actually very similar, but legally distinct”. Comes up a lot in these sort of nitpicky nerd circles Devs are always right, publishers/critics are always wrong

Here is a short list of ways in which the two games are similar: Same engine Same genre (so, trad RTS, selecting units, giving them orders, building up an economy to ensure a healthy supply of units to defeat opponents in a roughly similar situation to you) Region-based mechanics (building limits, buffs, privileged starting zone etc) Diplomacy mechanics Variety of victory conditions rather than hunting down every last power plant

Having now played at least some of both, these games feel substantially more different than many other pairs of games from similar devs that don’t get targeted like this. The main differences I’ve found: What players spend a lot of their time doing. Northgard heavily preferences micromanaging of the core unit (peasants), whereas Dune feels more like a trad RTS with Northgard characteristics. Northgard feels more like a village building game that also happens to be an RTS. Personally, I find the removal of peasant micromanagement a substantial improvement and one of the more annoying aspects of Northgard (especially annoying because it takes up a lot of the game) Mechanics present in Northgard are tightened and simplified substantially in Dune. This makes sense as Dune comes after Northgard and the devs have had time to hone down what worked in Northgard. For instance, scurrying around with scouts and trade relationships in Northgard is now just a single interface in Dune where you can manage your relationships etc. This does make relationships with other factions in Dune a little bit simpler, it’s not necessarily “better”. Different resources. Obviously, the relationship with these and things you actually do can change with a button, but neither are just “Money” and “population”. They both have these, but Dune Spice Wars isn’t being accused of being a palette swap of Age of Empires or Act of Aggression. No permanent Alliances: My experience with Northgard’s diplomacy was everything generally felt more permanent, whereas Dune has much more ebb and flow (as well as a limited set of hostile actions you can perform on allies). There can also only be one winner per match (two minds about this personally, I like allying with my friends and stomping on the computer, but it does change the diplomacy part of the game a lot). Less factions, greater faction differentiation. Given Northgard’s bread and butter was making lots of small DLCs with minor player factions, I feel like making a different game with both less factions but more content per faction is important.

Beyond those, there are a lot of smaller changes that it would be weird to go over. There’s a couple of mechanics that are sorta tacked on (e.g. the Landsraad council/influence stuff) that are different, but I hope you get the idea.

I have played a lot of different RTSes and I would say that mechanically these two games are more different than C&C and Tiberian Sun, or C&C and Red Alert (two pairs from the pre-DLC times), Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 (an example from another developer), Medal of Honour 1 and Call of Duty 1 (a pair of games from different developers with two different engines) etc.

I don’t really know why this annoyed me so much that I had to make a post. It might be touching on an extreme anti-DLC reaction that seems to want every single game to be entirely new despite most studios not having the resources to hire a network engineer every time they want to make a new game. The idea that a group of artists might commission a game engine (big, expensive, requires network engineers etc) and then write stories in that game engine (small, cheap, within reach for a group of artists) and not starve is apparently obscene.

I get pretty frustrated when someone walks slower than me and keeps lurching back and forth so I can't overtake. Idk why, might miss bus maybe.

I don't say or do anything, though sometimes I nip onto the road or between some tight terrain to overtake

It always seems to get deployed as a "The West are the only true innovators" and ignored if its like... The Islamic golden age or whatever. Also like some Arabian merchant couldn't have seen a steam train and gone "Oh, that's a good idea", it required colonialism to get ideas like plumbing etc. all over the world.

Bleh