Uber bit idea: have a bunch of 90s music videos playing in your car, but mix in the beavis and butthead riff versions with the actual videos

I liked it a lot too! Optimistic sci-fi about a couple competent people solving a problem - basically everything I love about the best episodes of Star Trek.

A few artists do put out material where the heads all have different shapes and characters are identifiable by them rather than just their hair, but I think the problem is more structural than anything else. Working manga and anime artists typically operate under sweatshop schedules and creativity doesn’t exactly thrive under those conditions.

ugh just shiny hunted eevee and i forgot how much doing that suckkkkkkks but imagine doing it without fast reset or fast forward on original hardware

first day using the pocket taco controller, for the price I’m definitely happy with it, it fits in my pocket alongside my phone so it perfectly slots into the niche below “carrying an entire second device” where is usefully portable, but it’s kind of a bummer that it’s Bluetooth because inputs are laggy and feel like they get lost sometimes. if only it had a little usbc port on the bottom instead of a hole. configuration with Retroarch Android is also annoying, when it works it works but it doesn’t work about half the time, although it feels like once i get it sorted i shouldn’t have to keep messing with it. but all of the caveats aside for $25 (the sale price i found mine on) it’s a pretty clear upgrade to touchscreen controls. probably gonna end up playing Pokemon rom hacks with it starting with Crystal Clear.

Fair, I was thinking more if the “ow my hip” aspect making me feel old, not so much the pain itself

I got not just one but two unrelated falling related injuries preventing me from being able to sleep so now while I lie here waiting for my freaking ibuprofen to kick in I get to feel like an old man

Hong loses the primary

You see, this is what happens when the last thing voters associate with your name is FLIP FLOPPING!

WHERE DID THAT DISAVOWAL OF “WOKE ONE” GET YOU? I BETTER SEE EVERY SUCCDEM FROM HERE ON OUT DOUBLING DOWN ON EVERYTHING THEY TWEETED IN 2020! CANCEL THANKSGIVING, IT’S A SHIT HOLIDAY AND MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVEN GET THE DAY OFF FOR IT ANYMORE!

but of course the dem consultant class will be spinning this razor thin primary as proof that everyone needs to be more moderate, despite the fact that radicals (in the context of American elections) are winning far more than they’re losing right now.

trade secrets for permanent residency in China

I don’t think China is actually making these deals anymore, every single one is just a honey pot

I’m on this level with Bethesda games too. Who else is out here trying to make a game where every single broom is interactable? There’s a magic to that kind of simulationist game design which is the reason why people still mod and play the crap out of Skyrim and FO4, even though I also agree that Bethesda have gotten worse at doing it every single time.

The alternatives, games like The Outer Worlds and Avowed, flop for me because instead of leaning into what’s unique about the game style they spend all of their effort trying to fix the things that are “broken” with it, which just results in a kind of mid open world experience.

reposting my musing on this from the megathread

All of the radical liberals backing off from shit they said in 2020 got me bummed. Like there’s room to criticize blm and “woke 1” but the criticism shouldn’t be “we don’t want to defund the police anymore”, the police DO need to be defunded, the prisons DO need to be abolished, etc. What we’re seeing is the dialectic by which the demsocs harness radical energy towards themselves and then diffuse it into social fascism. In ten years if the DSA keeps up their current momentum we’ll get national healthcare paid for by a 1% capital gains tax increase and we’ll be invading Canada for oil reserves revealed by the retreating permafrost.

It’s also damn chickenshit and a losing political message. You are conceding the right wing framing that these radical positions can’t be defended and were a mistake. They weren’t a fucking mistake, they were the foundation on which the entire movement we’re seeing towards social democracy/democratic socialism in the US right now was fucking built on. People got fucking excited for those radical fucking demands, and now you want to put them back on the shelf?

This is what capitalist isolation has done to us, because nobody in the US experiences politics through anything but an individualist framework, there is no institutional memory or ability to build anything that lasts. If the radical momentum was kept up then imagine how large and effective the American Socialism movement could be in six more years’ time! But everyone, even most of the so-called “socialists”, only think in terms of the next quarter’s profits the next election’s results. And that’s the real mind-killer that is electoralism, it completely blinds you to the forest because it makes you focus too much on the trees.

All of the radical liberals backing off from shit they said in 2020 got me bummed. Like there’s room to criticize blm and “woke 1” but the criticism shouldn’t be “we don’t want to defund the police anymore”, the police DO need to be defunded, the prisons DO need to be abolished, etc. What we’re seeing is the dialectic by which the demsocs harness radical energy towards themselves and then diffuse it into social fascism. In ten years if the DSA keeps up their current momentum we’ll get national healthcare paid for by a 1% capital gains tax increase and we’ll be invading Canada for oil reserves revealed by the retreating permafrost.

It’s also damn chickenshit and a losing political message. You are conceding the right wing framing that these radical positions can’t be defended and were a mistake. They weren’t a fucking mistake, they were the foundation on which the entire movement we’re seeing towards social democracy/democratic socialism in the US right now was fucking built on. People got fucking excited for those radical fucking demands, and now you want to put them back on the shelf?

This is what capitalist isolation has done to us, because nobody in the US experiences politics through anything but an individualist framework, there is no institutional memory or ability to build anything that lasts. If the radical momentum was kept up then imagine how large and effective the American Socialism movement could be in six more years’ time! But everyone, even most of the so-called “socialists”, only think in terms of the next quarter’s profits the next election’s results. And that’s the real mind-killer that is electoralism, it completely blinds you to the forest because it makes you focus too much on the trees.

Did a phone install in someone else’s house today, they had Confederate flags on the wall. that’s just about the only type of thing that makes me not want to be in someone’s house, like I don’t care if it’s messy, I don’t care if stuff’s broken, it is what it is but if you fucking put that shit up intentionally that’s fucking gross.

to paraphrase a genocidal imperialist, “the worst form of government except for all the other ones.”

Vibes based generational analysis is cringe, it is unforgivable, and I will not be gaslit otherwise.

I’m sure it’s fine

I’m imagining the critters have these stats:

health armor strength armor penetration attack speed attack range movement speed turning speed

they start at a default of 50 each, and every ability/passive modifies them in some way. for example, the “fire shot” ability could shoot a single fireball in a straight line that damages the first enemy it hits, castable once per eight seconds. it increases your attack range and attack speed, but decrease your health and armor. when your critter is a guest, they keep the stat changes, but instead of the active ability they get the passive “fire resistance 5%”.

so you can see how this encourages “builds” for critters. stack up damage and range at the cost of hp and armor for a glass cannon, range and movement/turning speed for a skirmisher, health and armor for a tank, etc. this also means that the “draft” phase before starting a campaign is a little tactical puzzle - if you want an army with a bias towards speed, then you can try to draft a combination of abilities that increase speed. It’s a reward for game knowledge, but not strictly necessary to enjoy the game.

when a player gets their 100 guest critters at the start of a campaign, one of the first things they should probably do is sort them into control groups based on stats so that they can put the tanks in front of the shooters, keep the skirmishers running around, etc. the game should probably help them out a bit - instead of arriving in a big clump, the critters arrive pre-sorted into 10-20 critter groups with similar stats, a kind of “recommended formation” for new players. Skilled players will be able to get better sorting by looking at the passive abilities on the critters (they know that fire resistance is +range and +atkspd) and making groups themselves, but the players who don’t want to think about it too much can of course just box-select everything and not even bother with control groups.

certain ability combinations can unlock a “synergy” on your critter. synergies are inherently role-changing - while every critter is assumed to be a straightforward dps unit by default, certain synergies will swap your attack out for a heal (SC:BW medic style), allow you to attack and move and the same time (vulture micro), turn your critter into a flying unit (muta micro), etc. This is how I get more varied “unit types” on the field - they are essentially highly specialized “classes” that a player opts their critter into by taking specific abilities. For visual clarity, it is important that each of these synergies has a clear visual indicator - right now I’m imagining that every critter starts off as a slime, but synergy abilities could manifest as unique customization options like bat wings, a unicorn horn, hooves, etc.

dreaming about a browser/mobile game called FediForest, a Federated Virtual Pet RTS

You raise a critter in a browser/app virtual pet app. they eat, sleep, and you can train and teach them things. this plays like a tomagatchi, slow and incremental, check in once or twice a day and your critter will be happy.

The main game, however, is an RTS. When you start a “campaign”, your critter is joined by 100 other critters from other players on the server. This is where the federation kicks in, because critters can be shared via activitypub with other servers.

The campaign starts with a build phase. No time limit, just gather resources around your base (you spawn on a randomized map) and build facilities. The critters come to you with various conditions based on their actual status on the server, so you must build cafeterias to feed the hungry ones, showers to clean the dirty ones, etc. You can also build defensive structures to protect your base, armories to upgrade your critters, etc.

When you’re ready, you press a button to start a mission. You will either be defending (tower defense style) or raiding (pikmin style). Get resources from the enemy base, protect your own buildings, micro your army around enemy attacks, and try to avoid your critters getting KO’d (you have to foot the medical bill).

Every mission completed awards loot, and a loot multiplier builds up as you go deeper into a campaign, but your critters also develop fatigue the more they attack/take damage. Fatigue slows them down, and since losing is expensive you have to walk the line to get as much as possible while ending the campaign before disaster strikes. In between missions is another build phase, which is always no time limit like the first.

When a campaign ends, every critter that participated gets a “commendation” that their player can open in the incremental part of the game, giving them XP, training, etc based on the results of your campaign. There is no limit to the number of campaigns you can play, but each one starts with a fresh batch of 100 randomly selected critters from your federated server network and a fresh base building phase on a fresh map.

Critters are highly customizable. You can train/teach them to to four abilities during the incremental game, and every ability has an active and a passive version. Active abilities only apply to your critter, making them the keystone unit when you play, while your critter’s passive abilities apply when they are a guest in someone else’s game. When starting a campaign, players will get a hint as to what random elements they will be dealt, and can attempt to bias their random critter selection towards or away from certain passives.

Crucially the RTS element attempts to split the casual/hardcore divide by never forcing you to macro and micro at the same time. macro phases are always at your own place, and micro battles are meant to be tactical and tense rather than sprawling and confusing. The movement mechanics are deliberately “imperfect”, drawing from old school movement algorithms from games like WC3 and SC:BW to give “textured” movement that allows for a lot of player skill expression.

Another cool idea I have is that every federated server can apply their own mods and content patches to the game for players on that server. Whether it’s just a little MOTD on game start, balance tweaking, purely visual redesigns or gameplay overhauls adding new units and abilities, I want servers running the game to think of the rules as suggestions. Federation therefore has a lot of settings for admins to tweak, like determining what to import and what to block from federated servers, sensible defaults for when another server’s mods tries to send over something unrecognized, etc.

Been thinking about military boot camp lately. The whole “break you down and build you up” thing isn’t how you train somebody to be good at something, it’s how you indoctrinate someone into a cult. I guess that’s intentional, but there’s gotta be a more rational way to do it.

We know how to get people to do things in difficult circumstances. If you want someone to be able to shoot their gun at the little speck in the distance while being shot at, you train them to shoot at little specks for hours and hours until they can do it without thinking about it. You could apply the same principle to using heavy weapons, talking on the radio, whatever else a troop needs to do.

You don’t need cult shit to build espirit de corps, you just need a bunch of people working and living together. Training sucks even without all of the humiliation rituals and hazing, so they’ll bond over it naturally. And there’s no shortage of other ways you can build a sense of comraderie by making sure that everyone understands the mission and why it’s important.

I guess to an extent the military I imagine is impossible in an imperialist society. You need to indoctrinate people to a greater degree when you’re making them routinely go off and kill others unprovoked in a way that you don’t when what they’re doing is defending themselves and their neighbors.

Money is the root of all political power, and the police need to have their budget slashed in almost every municipality in the US. Mamdani has been playing footsie with 70 million dollars which is frankly a joke compared to the NYPD’s budget which is over 6 billion. I understand that he can’t just come out and say “I’m going to cut it to 10% of its current amount”, but he should come out of the gate with an opening bid of something like reducing the budget by 1 billion dollars by retiring all of the expensive military equipment that they have stockpiled, reducing officers and reducing hours, etc.

Personally I would also like to see a rhetorical shift towards the police’s role in society, something like “more accounting, less patrolling”, with the message being that we should be spending more money getting people’s stolen wages (the number one form of theft in terms of dollars stolen and it’s not even close) back and fighting white collar crime in general. Then the remainder of the budget could be put to useful things instead of paying overtime for bored thugs to stand around in the subway browsing their phones.