FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Was curious what it looks like with something other than the bright-colored textures from the last commit.
Nope, those are the diffuse maps. They're pretty dreadful without any additional mapping and texture.
Thanks for the link. I'm gonna try to get the freighter into the game next, and try to get something better on it than the raw diffuse color.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
pending a more substantive reply, can you do it in a way that doesn't sound like a SOE advertisement? We ban those on sight, but if you want to describe what you're doing and invite people to join like an actual human, I'd imagine that would probably be okay.
I've been making a bunch of spaceship models, but so far all of them have been fairly rough concepts. I've done some simple material coloring for the concepts, and I did some very simple UV-work and flat-color diffuse mapping for the frigate and the cruiser we got into the game, but they looked like complete ass. So last week, I took a couple days off work... and promptly got super sick, and spent my vacation days and the weekend also in a fever haze.
But on the way down and the way back up, I decided to finally dig in to Blender's normal-baking systems. The freighter is the next ship up, so I took one of the simple cargo container modules, and modeled up a high-poly version, and baked it down to a normal map for the low-poly version. I'm working on figuring out how to bake down ambient occlusion as well, and that should improve the diffuse maps dramatically. actually modelling out high-detail versions of the ships will be its own challenge, but one step at a time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The only reason she was ever notable was because of her position and platform. Those remain unchanged. Scott paid significant personal costs for his opposition to her. What evidence is there that she has paid any cost? In what sense is she "losing" in any objective sense?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
This was my thought as well, but then it's notable that she still has an audience and a platform. That a problem can be identified does not mean that the problem is solved. Scott decried her during the fight over the soul of progressivism. To the extent that he had a side, they lost that fight, and Marcotte and her allies won.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Absence of stable families correlates strongly with all this awful stuff. Stable families correlate with the opposite of all this awful stuff. We know a considerable amount of the variance in family stability is cultural, because we've seen the rates change dramatically within living memory due to cultural changes.
Ditto for the crime rate generally; We've had it lower, and we've had it higher. What we have is what we've collectively chosen.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
It would be phenomenally stupid to demand the extradition of citizens of your security guarantor over a crime which isn't illegal in that country, so you have to expect that the UK foreign ministry will stop things from getting to that point.
"demand" implies one party trying to secure something from an unwilling second party. What we have already seen a number of times is "friendly" nations laundering hostile actions against their own disfavored citizens through their allies. I'd agree that it's unlikely to look like an extradition order against Musk for hate speech, but the federal government offering prompt cooperation on trumped-up charges or absurd fines targeting central examples of first-amendment-protected speech seems probable, if it hasn't happened already.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I use a program called Silo for the base modelling, but I save them as .objs, import to blender to handle normals and UV-mapping, and export from there for freespace. I think I was adding _EXPORT as a tag to mark which models were which in my archive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
That poem is reflecting the elite/prole equilibrium in a high-trust, high-cohesiveness, homogenous society with decent state capacity, to name a few of the variables that no longer obtain. Applying it to societies with enough trust that credit cards work is unwise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I can dig it. Sorta like an 18-wheeler being run in a stable corporate environment, versus the same truck being lived out of long-term by the driver and his family... Pure transport, versus transport/utility/shipyard/mining base/fuel depot. So less clean containerization, more signs of repurposing and jury-rigging for short-term needs?
And sometimes its just so satisfying to see white supremacist rhetoric about certain groups turned back on them this eloquently.
Alternatively, your moral resistance to racism observably diminishes so long as it's aimed at the "correct" race. Suppose the Count is wrong on the particulars, and an examination of the statistics reveals that, in fact, migrants in the UK are "worse", by whatever standards you are now flirting with, than the native underclass (and note the obvious dishonesty of comparing all immigrants to only the worst of the natives). If it turns out the natives are in fact better, does that mean the white supremacists had a point all along, or does it just prove that your entire interest in the topic begins and ends with its utility toward bashing the outgroup?
Between this and the luria-posting last week, Hlynka continues to age like fine wine.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
however that doesn't mean it's any less stupid to do this when there is an alternative reasonable interpretation that makes you look very stupid.
Your alternative interpretation is not, in fact, reasonable. Neither the recorder nor his audience nor you nor I are at all confused about the meaning of the gesture. Pretending otherwise is just another example of waging the culture war.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
Tramp Freighter
"A bare-bones hull designed to transport cargo as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Weak engines and an unshielded, externally-mounted jump drive give it poor maneuverability and long jump times in emergency situations. Completely unarmed, it relies on escorts for protection from hostiles."
One of the last requests was for a transport for use in our first scenario. So here we go: a flying block of cargo containers. The ship proper is little more than a heavy tug mated to a cargo frame, with a bargain-basement jump drive mounted externally out front. The goal was "cheap" and "utilitarian"; I kinda think it could use some cargo-handling cranes or something similar to give it a bit more visual interest.
@ArjinFermin - Man, I haven't touched spaceships in a while. it's a pity I didn't do any more on them; life just got too crazy there for a couple months. Where'd I even leave off...?
Buffering posts:
- new fighter
- picket ship
- strike ship
- freighter
- battleship
- heavy cruiser
- weapon turrets
- probably other stuff I forgot, like half the stuff on this list I found today while looking for the other half...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
That's valuable data. My point is that "this competitor is a man, men have an unfair advantage" should cash out in observable lopsided results, so appealing to the results should trump raw priors. My impression is that it generally does, but more data either way is a good thing for my confidence in that argument.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
In the discussion of women's sports, there's a meme that women athletes are overmatched by male athletes: Womens' national soccer team vs 14-year-old boys and Serena Williams vs Male tennis players are two instances that pop up with some frequency here.
In the Trans sports debate, there's a meme that allowing trans athletes in combat sports is a super bad idea, because biological males overmatch females in this way.
It seems relevant to the discussion to ask how dominant a particular trans athlete is. If they've been defeated by biological women, then obviously their particular advantage is not as overwhelming as the standard male vs female athletes meme would suggest. A lot of the description of this event is pretty clearly claiming overmatch. If this competitor has lost to normal female competitors before, then I don't think overmatch is supportable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
thanks. replaced it with another source of the same chart, should be working now.
The further you go back, the more labor was required to do any basic task. Certainly they still took joy in what they could, but they did so with aching joints and bowed backs.
And we do so with mental illness, narcotics abuse, depression and loneliness. They were happy in different ways and miserable in different ways, but I'm not convinced they were actually fundamentally more miserable than we are in any meaningful sense, or happier either for that matter. Which is better: to lose some of your children, or to never have children at all? The former seems much superior to me, and claims to the contrary seem naïve.
There is a reason in the rust belt than when you ask many miners do they want their sons to become miners they say no. Because they know it is a crippling, dangerous job.
I'm pretty sure those miners thought that their sons could have all the good things of their own life and none of the bad things, with the idea being that the bad things wouldn't simply be replaced by other bad things. But it seems to me that, in fact, they were. Less aching joints and bowed backs. More meth zombies and fentanyl corpses, suicide, mental illness, deep alienation and so on. I am not convinced that the former outweighs the latter.
Just because lives weren't unending hell misery and that people made do with what they could, does not mean that the very real and material benefits of human endeavour have not improved the human experience.
Life has obviously changed in many ways. There are fewer of old bad things, and more of new bad things. There are likewise fewer of old good things, and more of new good things. Your argument is that there's more units of good and fewer units of bad on net, and if that's your honest impression, fair enough, but it is certainly not mine. I've had a lot of changes in my own life, and a considerable amount of both pain and joy; I note that the sources of both were generally things that were not in any meaningful sense novel. The ways I've been miserable were ways that were, in all essential particulars, available to people five thousand years ago, and likewise for the ways I've found joy. Is it truly different for you?
You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles.
I am, but would appreciate either elaboration or a link to what you consider the strongest version of the Luria argument. I remember it being profoundly unconvincing, but I'd like to read it again to be sure I'm not missing something. Specifically, I understand the general form of the "if A then B" that was supposedly beyond them, but I'd like some detail on exactly what consequences you expect to derive from this claim, such that you think the absence of this ability would make their thought alien to me. How were they actually different in their lived experience, in their life choices, in how they acted and what they did?
Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
None of these features seem alien in any way. Widespread examples of all of these characteristics are available in the modern world, and in America even, not to mention many other examples of behavior I find equally deplorable or abhorrent in many other varieties. None of this is even close to as alien as, say, the Apache or Comanche, and I would not describe them as bizarrely alien.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion.
To be a bit more specific, they were "like us" in that they had exactly the same vices and virtues as we have, in roughly equal proportions; only the detail of how these were expressed culturally seems to differ. Further, they had most of the same major life experiences, and those we do not share have close analogues. I see no way to couch this as "a sparse overlap". I can read their stories and immediately grok the ideas behind them, and find them familiar to me. I'm pretty sure they had bullying, crushes, sweethearts, rivals, hated enemies, ambition, jealousy, deceit... I am confident they had people essentially like me, and people essentially like you, in short.
Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
I would love to do so. And I do not particularly doubt that I would be able to do so. As for crushing my skull, I suppose you are doubling down on the incomprehensibly violent nature of the 16th century German peasantry; the "astronomical murder rate", the stabbings, the honor killings and so on. Truly, how could anyone communicate with such alien savages?
Well, here's the first graph result for the search "murder rate 16th century germany".
By the 1600s, the Germans are down to around 10 murders per 100,000, and the dread Italians are around 35. At that point, the 1600s Guido Menace would have moderately less violent that American blacks in the 2000s, and moderately more violent than those same blacks in the 2010s. I'd guess the Vile Huns were somewhere roughly in the ballpark of Appalachian whites from the same era. American blacks, in any case, are likewise not entirely unfamiliar with domestic violence, or indeed with animal cruelty for sport. And they're like this in the modern world with all the blessings of modernity, not least of which is a system of truly remarkable trauma medicine to turn 1600s murders into mere 2000s woundings. I used to work with a lot of underclass Blacks in an underclass job. Was I likewise underestimating how "deeply alien" my black coworkers were, or are these feelings of alienation reserved only for the distant past?
The disparity between your claims and the immediately-available evidence is confusing to me, to the point that I worry I'm reading the charts wrong. Is there something I'm missing here?
In any case, humans do heinous shit, always have and always will. None of this is new, or indeed old and forgotten, but rather simply is. None of it is incomprehensible. I imagine German or Italian peasants would be horrified by a description of American abortion practices, or OnlyFans, or Pride Parades, or indeed any number of our other modern abominations, but in fact none of that is new in its fundamental essence either.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
So exhibits a, b, c, are warnings that were not warned or bans that didn't happen? How is it consistent to hold those posts against him if they apparently didn't break the rules?
You are failing to understand the evidence presented.
Exhibits A, B, and C are all examples of rule-breaking; they did not recieve mod action because he ate a ban for a fourth comment concurrently in the queue. When that happens, we ban and comment for one such post message and then dismiss the reports on the other examples, rather than adding a separate formal warning for each individual infraction.
He has been reported many times, four of those reports drew formal warnings, and a fifth drew a tempban. He has now drawn a second, longer temp-ban for another spate of rule-breaking. The exhibits will not go on his permanent record, any more than the majority of his previous infractions have. On the other hand, we have working memory, and even if we didn't his comments are publicly available and can be perused by anyone at any time.
Do you recognize that, formally warned or not, the "exhibits" provided are good examples of bad posting? If so, then it should be easy to understand that those who make a maintain a habit of posting in that manner will have some of their posts reported, elevating them to the attention of the mods, who will warn and then ban them. The solution to this is to not post in such a manner, and if you are posting in such a manner, to read and internalize the rules and cease to do so.
If you find the rules or the mod interpretation of them difficult to grasp, feel free to ask questions and I'll personally be happy to answer them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
We should. How is that incompatible with the following?
Our bandit hordes are already here. The warlords that will tame them have already been born. And when they do, earthly notions of equality, sameness and tolerance will go with them.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
Compare that to this comment:
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
The difference seems pretty clear to me.
if you have any doubts, feel free to message the post to me or one of the other mods privately first. Looking forward to it otherwise.
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