I see. Would there also be an arc if you put your hand near the generator while it was running, then?

Does the human body rapidly discharge into air or something?

Okay, so you’re insulated from ground. The generator charges you up. You are at the same charge as the generator. You let go of the generator. Why is there a potential difference?

Thing that confuses me is that when you let go, you should have the same charge as the generator. No charge difference, no arc. Unless I’m wrong about something, which I probably am (hence my confusion).

Why wouldn’t the electrons go to ground through your body while you’re touching it?

It’s actually counterproductive! People who want to screen stuff about abuse from their internet experience can set up filters. Those filters are broken when you censor the relevant words!

Typically it does flow better, but I have a little mental stumble every time someone uses “woman” or “women” as an adjective. I know why they’re doing it and I can’t really fault them, it just… feels off.

That may be true, and I’m glad that improvements are being made, but it’s not the display. It’s not the sound. It’s not my keyboard backlight (which got locked on maximum brightness). It’s that with Linux, getting anything working requires hours of troubleshooting. Probably if I understood the system better it would only take minutes of troubleshooting, but developing those skills would take months to years. I don’t want to invest that sort of effort just to write papers, check my email, take notes, do CAD, and play games.

I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.

• Many of them did not work with my 3840x2400 screen, with unreadably tiny UI
• The sound did not always work
• When the sound did work, I either couldn’t change the volume, or figure out how to disable the speakers when I plug in headphones
• Sometimes screen brightness could not be changed

In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux… but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn’t, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.

(assuming the time traveller cooperates)

Then it depends on whether the future is mutable, or if we’re forced into stable time loops. If time is stable, I’d get some friends. I would never speak to the time traveller directly, but I would text back-and-forth with my friends as they talk to the time traveller. When 3 hours are up, the traveller goes back in time to talk to a different friend in the same three-hour window. (If they’re tired, they can travel back 12 hours and catch some sleep before the next meeting.) It would be an interestingly acausal conversation, but Objective 1 would be finding a more permanent way to bypass the three-hour limit, maybe setting up an AI that will ask good questions of the time traveller. (If they can bring a USB stick with some good AI on it, for instance). We’d also want the future version of Wikipedia, and detailed plans for whatever useful technology gets invented in the future. As well as enough almanac knowledge to get seed money for a future-tech company, and useful news items. I wouldn’t ask about mounting crises like global warming, though, so that my company can do something about it – if I base my actions on knowledge of the future, the future is set. I think.

If the future is truly mutable, though, I just resolve to send a detailed summary of our conversation back in time to a week before I schedule the traveller to come. I get a conversation summary, use it to make the conversation more productive, and then send the new summary back. Repeat until I can take over the world, build a time machine, send a large expedition back to 12,000 BC to do an industrial revolution, and then send an even larger expedition back to the early Universe. When entropy starts to become annoying, go another century before the previous expedition and just accept them as citizens. Repeat until godhood achieved.

3 hours from whose perspective? Time limits are rather complicated when you have time travel.

Wesnoth’s very fun too!

In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There’s no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have “reputation” scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone’s lying.

The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.

Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn’t take a cut.

This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they’re bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner’s identity is revealed only if they’re being sued – I’m not a lawyer and you’d have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren’t skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they’re taking for server fees).

It’s so long, especially if you get turned around. Which is easy to do, since it violates one of the core rules of combat level design: have a clear path forward. And it’s interspersed with “puzzles” that are really just exercises in frustration.

There’s a specific command to skip the ocean house, but I didn’t mind that. I wish I could skip the damned sewers.

We started deploying malaria vaccines!

Mallory Chipman is wonderful.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

I just fell off the couch.

Maybe just because we don’t understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:

A dog entered into a tavern and said, ‘I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.’

This would indeed result in no more war, at all. I fail to see the problem. (Besides that it wouldn’t work, of course – but it’s a nice fantasy.)