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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2535 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This weekend I'm on a trip with my wife, somewhere we go about twice a year. There's a spot where the directions in my mind involve, confusingly, "Drive down this road until you start to worry you went the wrong way or passed it, then it will be on your left in three minutes or so." And every time, it works, I start to get nervous that I missed it, then it's right there exactly after I have that thought. Totally reliably. There's a few places where my mental map includes that instruction, places I go to regularly enough that I know this will happen, that I'll worry I went the wrong way, but not often enough to not worry I went the wrong way. I sort of draft off a semi conscious reaction I know I'll have at a certain time as a reliable signpost.

Anyone else have examples of this idea, of using their own subconscious reactions as a reliable guide? Or a conceptual idea of it?

I know exactly what you mean, although I can't quite think of a concrete example. I've definitely experienced the same thing, where right about the time I start to doubt my choice is when it becomes apparent I chose the right path (or whatever).

So, what are you reading?

I finished Récit d'un paysan russe this week, which is a book in Russian published by Institut d'études slaves in Paris. It's the memoires of a Russian émigré, Ivan Stolyarov, who, unlike most of them, was actually born and grew up a peasant.

The gap between the peasantry and everyone else around the turn of the 20th century is simply astonishing. People like to say that Russian burghers, living in their posads with their vegetable gardens were basically peasants, but the gap between them and actual village peasants that were living like it wasn't 1900, but 1800, 1700 even, is hard to comprehend without reading a book like this. I guess you might find people living like this in India and SE Asia these days, but back then the peasants were the majority of Russians. Uplifting them must've been a herculean task for the Bolsheviks (and they extracted a terrible cost from them in return).

The book this book reminds me of the most is, surprisingly, Incandescence by Greg Egan, one of his less popular novels. In it an alien civilization, faced with an imminent destruction of their homeworld, engineered themselves into a very hardy water bear kind of creatures, but with a twist. In usual circumstances, they would grow up, live and die in ignorance, content to toil for their daily grub. However, if the gestation happened in times of ecological stress, they would be born increasingly smart and driven to ensure the survival of the population. Two human explorers are brought to a boring and stable asteroid populated with these creatures and they learn that since the process is stochastic, there are individuals who are smart and driven and very lonely even in the most stable conditions.

Récit d'un paysan russe is basically the thoughts of one such creature. There's no vitriolic hatred of peasantry there in the style of Maxim Gorky, Stolyarov understands that the cruelty and small-mindedness are not people's personal failings, you can't blame them all for not being like Stolyarov or Douglass, but nor can you ignore the system and the culture that holds these people back.

I suppose no English translation exists?

Also this sort of peasant literature was a big thing in Turkish back in the 50s. It had big soviet support so that sort of politics is always visible but I remember reading plenty of books written by ex peasants describing many elements of peasant life as a kid.

I don't think one exists. There's a review, but I couldn't find a complete translation.

After appreciating Mikhail Elizarov's songs I decided to check out his books, starting with Librarian.

I've been waiting for the Fun Thread to post this, since it is manifestly not CW. I had a conversation about physics, namely about the expansion of space and the feasibility of intergalactic travel, in the CW thread a few days back. I came back to it, and some things I wrote have been bugging me enough that I want to issue a clarification.

Here's the relevant thread.

https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/15941?context=8#context

Basically I said that the expansion of the universe renders galaxies that are beyond a certain distance unreachable absent some form of FTL travel, since the universe's expansion isn't set at any constant rate of speed - any two points in space recede at a rate proportional to their distance from each other, and that distance is increasing, therefore the rate of recession of the two points is increasing. This means there will be some galaxies far enough away from us that they recede faster than the speed of light.

I got this question in response: "Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet."

And this was my reply: "The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur. Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance."

The issue here is that there are additional real-life complexities absent in the model I was outlining which I neglected to address when I wrote this (note: do not write when you're tired unless you want to omit things you should've mentioned). Now, I don't have too much of a problem with what I wrote here - I stand behind my point that ceteris paribus, anything in a superluminally receding region of space in which expansion is driving the objects away from you faster than light would simply be completely unreachable, and you wouldn't be able to magically "close the distance" and catch up. The area where things are receding from us slower than light is called our Hubble volume, and is a sphere approx 14 billion light years in radius (everything outside of it is moving away faster than light). However, I want to clear something up: We can sometimes receive light from galaxies outside our Hubble sphere at the time the light was emitted, meaning light-speed information in a region of space which is receding from us faster than light can in fact travel to us. So how can this be possible?

The reason is because the Hubble constant (the unit that describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from a particular point in space) is decreasing, causing our Hubble volume to expand. This means that photons emitted by galaxies in a superluminal region can eventually enter inside of our Hubble volume and be able to reach us, and this is not because light is magically "catching up" - it is receding, but its recession doesn't outpace the growth of our Hubble volume. Similarly, the recession speed between light we emit and an object farther than the Hubble distance is initially positive, but can become negative as the Hubble distance increases. Here's a Veritasium video with a visual representation of how this can happen.

Of course, there's a limit to this too - there's a point beyond which light emitted from objects are receding from us so fast that they will never fall inside of our Hubble volume, and this boundary is delineated by the "cosmological event horizon" which is currently about 16 billion light years in radius.

There is another bigger issue that I want to correct here, and that's my statement that we might not make it outside our Local Group (and that this has something to do with expansion). I knew previously that our reachable universe was much larger than that, but of course practically speaking that's very optimistic and assumes we leave now and at the speed of light. What I was thinking was that 1: if relativistic speeds are hard to accomplish, our closest galaxies might be expanding away from us faster than we can travel, and 2: even if relativistic speeds are possible expansion might set a limit on how much we can progress before our closest galaxies are eventually isolated from us. Again, I wrote this bit while not thinking too deeply about it, and have since reasoned myself out of this position.

With regards to the first point, one of our closest galaxy clusters (the M81 Group) is currently 11.4 million light years away from us, and the Hubble constant (according to some estimates) is 68 km/s/Mpc. 11.4 million light years is equivalent to 3.5 megaparsecs, and that means the M81 Group is expanding away from us at 238 km/s. That is a very small fraction of the speed of light, and probably isn't impossible for us to exceed given that the Parker Solar Probe has already been able to reach speeds of 163 km/s. The rate of recession only becomes prohibitive for objects much further from us.

Note, this doesn't mean that I think travel to another galaxy cluster is actually that feasible, it just means expansion wouldn't pose too large an obstacle for us. The reason why it would be difficult in a practical sense is not just because of the difficulty of finding a reasonable propulsion method, it's also because of the time involved to travel the entire distance. Even in a colony ship travelling at 99% of the speed of light, the trip to the M81 Group would take an unrealistically long time, even accounting for relativistic effects from the perspective of the traveller. As viewed from the spaceship, an 11.4 million light-year trip would be 1,624,412 years long, which is far longer than the entirety of human history (here's a neat website that helps you calculate these things, for the lazy). This is assuming that we travel constantly at 99% the speed of light the entire way, it's not taking into account acceleration and deceleration to the destination, so this is a minimum estimate. There's simply no way to design for missions of that length, nor will there be for a very long time, if indeed ever.

Accelerating to 99.99999999...% of the speed of light would create enough dilation to get us there in an acceptably short time, but there's something else stopping us from doing that (even assuming we manage to find a method of propulsion which will allow us to go that fast, which is a big assumption). And that's space dust. At 99% of the speed of light, hitting a 4 milligram grain of dust in space gets you 2,188,941 megajoules of kinetic energy (here's the calculator I used, I use them because I want to mess with the variables without having to do the calculation again and again). A ton of TNT contains 4,184 megajoules of energy, so that 4 milligram grain of dust at 0.99c is going to be equivalent to 523 tons of TNT exploding. Even hitting a dust grain of 0.1 mg at that speed is going to yield you 54,724 megajoules of kinetic energy, equivalent to 13 tons of TNT.

Get closer and closer to the speed of light so that the travel duration becomes more reasonable, and eventually these grains of dust are going to start looking more and more like Hiroshima.

So it's not that I think that travelling to another galaxy cluster is feasible, it's rather that at this point, expansion is a red herring. If we can't travel faster than 238 km/s in the first place, the travel time would be far too long for us to even think about starting a mission even assuming that the M81 Group isn't receding from us. Even non-lethal relativistic speeds won't take us there in any reasonable time. Travelling to other galaxy clusters is probably FTL or nothing (we're talking Alcubierre drives and wormholes here and not actual travel faster than light, because of the constraints relativity poses, and there are still many problems with those methods which means there is plenty of reason to suspect FTL is not possible).

As to the second point about the time limit expansion imposes, it turns out the timeframe we have before our closest neighbours have receded into superluminally receding regions of space which we will never be able to reach (without FTL, that is) is hundreds of billions of years, so this timeframe probably doesn't pose too much of an obstacle. Whether exiting our Local Group is actually feasible or not in the first place is almost certainly the main factor. And the reasons why it might not be feasible are huge.

Oh dang, I just now saw this, in the October Quality Contributions thread! As the interrogator in the initial conversation, thank you for posting this. That's one hell of a follow-up, hah! This kinda stuff interests me quite a bit, but I know very little, so I very much appreciate your patience and thoroughness with this reply! Would you mind horribly if I impose on your grey matter some more? Having read this response, I think my original question was poorly put. It was based on something vaguely remembered from a throwaway conversation somewhen that made sense to me but I didn't fully grok, regarding the interplay of reference frames.

The Hubble constant indicates that the rate of recession increases as distance between the observer and the object in question increases, right? In practice thus far, all observations/measurements are made from Earth (or at least Earth-local) frames, so it seems everything outside our local frame is expanding away from us, with M81 expanding away at 238 km/s from Earth given its current distance of ~12 megaparsecs. So if we travel in that direction at 239 km/s, the rate of expansion between it and us begins to slow down, because we're a bit closer, yah? And that property scales all the way up to lightspeed: as long as we go a little faster than current expansion, we can get there. Which means we have a few thousand years to develop 99.7/c travel without unrecoverably losing much, if any, of the observable universe. (of course those atom lives matter too, but we may simply not be able to save them all)

It's possible I was thinking the Hubble constant was non-linear, which would seem to create some weirdness with multiple observers, but I'm honestly not sure. Either way, thanks again for this comment--I've been reading cosmophysics all day, lol.

I love the cosmological analysis but would be curious to hear your thoughts about the practicalities of closing those distances from the following perspective:

  • The journey begins 100-1000 years from now

  • Civilization consists of strongly superintelligent artificial general intelligences that have harvested all of the mass energy of our planet / solar system / galaxy / local group to construct astronomical data centers to wring almost as much computer out of our available mass-energy as permitted by the laws of physics (dyson swarms, or a hyper-advanced computer suspended across the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, or something else of that nature)

  • The expedition to a distant galaxy cluster consists of a Von Neumann probe, whose design objectives are (1) get there, (2) repurpose the mass-energy of that region of space to build another giant computer, and (3) (optional) establish communication with the parent civilization to facilitate the transmission of digital intelligences or the exchange of information.

If you assume that scenario, it seems like many of your objections dissolve. The difficulty of accelerating a probe to greater than 238km/s seems comparatively trivial (the probe can be as small as needed to meet the objectives above, and the probe design, the mechanism of accelerating and then decelerating, and redundancies or solutions to the problem of space dust can all be assisted by galaxy-brain technology), and there's no population of primates that needs to reproduce and sustain a culture for over a million years.

I do find it perplexing how many accounts of humanity's far future seem to assume that we'll be tackling problems that span millennia with the technology and life-forms that exist as of (give or take) 2022. In my head, I call it the Primates In Space Fallacy.

On a cursory inspection I'd say your argument has some merit. It's plausible that artificial intelligence might be able to send probe after probe out which accelerates then coasts in the intergalactic void for millions of years, and if even one of them actually reaches the destination intact it could make copies of itself elsewhere in the manner you describe.

Success rates would probably still be low, though. Space dust is not the only limit to the speed you can travel (though it is a significant one), there's also other hazards to contend with in interstellar and intergalactic space when you're travelling at highly relativistic speeds. And there's also the fact that finding a method of propulsion that will create strong enough relativistic effects to shorten the travel time significantly is hard - as noted earlier, even if the probe is able to achieve 99% of the speed of light (a very tall order) it will still take it over a million years to get to the M81 Group. And the longer the travel time, the more problems can occur - even a minuscule chance of equipment damage or malfunction becomes an unreasonably big issue when the timeframe is millions of years. However, with the human element removed, tackling the issue through sheer volume alone is much more feasible and much less objectionable when your repeated suicide missions involve Von Neumann probes instead of generation ships carrying flesh and blood humans.

With regards to establishing communication with the new outpost, however, there are problems which I can't help but view as being insurmountable. Once the probe reaches the M81 Group it would take 11.4 million light years for the original AI to receive a response, and that time lag means that the utility of communication with the other AI would be negligible at best since all the information it'd receive would be coming from an outpost which could be long dead. The two AIs would effectively be cut off from each other, and expansion over a very long period would drive the two clusters further and further away from each other which would mean that they'd eventually end up being completely isolated and unable to communicate.

Perhaps I should've made it more clear that I was merely talking about the limits of what any manned mission could reach - while artificial intelligence making it outside of our Local Group is definitely something interesting it's also not us as in humanity making it there. The kinds of things that could make the journey are not biological in nature. I guess the argument could be made that a new humanity could be constructed in situ by the AI itself after it's been seeded in the new galaxy cluster and technically represents an "expansion" of human life (whether this is a likely outcome at all given the abundant hazards of AI is another question entirely), but the original humans in our Local Group are still basically stuck there and this is probably not what people imagine when they think of humans venturing out into the universe.

Success rates would probably still be low, though. Space dust is not the only limit to the speed you can travel (though it is a significant one), there's also other hazards to contend with in interstellar and intergalactic space when you're travelling at highly relativistic speeds.

238km/s is not highly relativistic. Also it would be silly to travel at 99.9% the speed of light when you could travel at 90% for a tiny fraction of the energy and risk and get there less than 10% later. The only reason to do it would be so that less time passes for your travelers -- but if it's a self-repairing box of electronics and robotics, engineered by a galaxy-brain superintelligence, it can probably while away the millions of years without issue. There are no primates on board who are aging, nor even who are consuming energy to maintain.

You also don't have to make the trip all in one shot. Your civilization is probably launching probes in all directions to absorb the galaxy and then neighboring galaxies and then outward from there -- basically an expanding sphere of civilization led by Von Neumann probes. And you can send a lot of probes -- depending on how small they can be and how efficient their propulsion is, even a very high loss rate can just be overcome with quantity. Another advantage of not having precious primates on board!

Once the probe reaches the M81 Group it would take 11.4 million light years for the original AI to receive a response, and that time lag means that the utility of communication with the other AI would be negligible at best since all the information it'd receive would be coming from an outpost which could be long dead.

Why would the outpost be dead? Galaxy-brained superintelligences don't seem like likely to be mercurial creatures that might just die off one day from a plague or civil war or something. Once they're established, I assume they're gonna be here till the end of time.

Perhaps I should've made it more clear that I was merely talking about the limits of what any manned mission could reach - while artificial intelligence making it outside of our Local Group is definitely something interesting it's also not us as in humanity making it there.

Right, that's why I framed my challenge as a hypothetical -- what would it look like if you made some different assumptions. Nothing seems to stand in the way of galaxy-spanning superintelligences, so if anything it would seem to demand more artifice not to have that future -- some reason why we don't have massive superintelligences that doesn't also involve the destruction of human civilization. I think humanity is going to let go of our sentimental attachment to meat-based life basically as soon as we have a digital alternative -- but even if we don't, as you say, presumably your Von Neumann probes could build "human manufactories" on the other side of their voyage, even from digitally reconstituted genomes from our local group, in which case I don't see why they'd be any less "ours" than whatever distant descendants clambered off of a successful million year generation ship after it arrived on the other side of the cosmic ocean.

Anyway... if I'm right about the trajectory of our species, how much of our light cone do you think we could in principle colonize? That's the interesting question IMO. We've already lost a bunch of the cosmos over the cosmological horizon, and we'll lose more over the next 100-1000 years while we prepare our ballochory, and we need to draw the bounds somewhat tighter than the cosmological horizon given that we won't be traveling at precisely c, but it seems to me that our descendant civilization still stands to inherit a staggering cosmic endowment even with those assumptions.

238km/s is not highly relativistic. Also it would be silly to travel at 99.9% the speed of light when you could travel at 90% for a tiny fraction of the energy and risk and get there less than 10% later. The only reason to do it would be so that less time passes for your travelers -- but if it's a self-repairing box of electronics and robotics, engineered by a galaxy-brain superintelligence, it can probably while away the millions of years without issue. There are no primates on board who are aging, nor even who are consuming energy to maintain.

I'm aware 238 km/s isn't highly relativistic, travelling slightly above that speed just means the probe will spend a painfully large amount of time cruising. And even non-relativistic travel poses issues. For example your probe is going to encounter the harsh radiation environment in space, even if it's not travelling at relativistic speeds (if it is it's much worse). Shielding could be possible if one was willing to add to probe mass, but if it fails to block all of the radiation it's going to be exposed to that for the entirety of the journey. This is fine when your mission duration is short. It's less fine when your mission duration is millions of years and your probe contains lots of delicate electronics that need to work properly.

Self-repair is hypothetically possible, but that requires usable energy and matter, and interstellar and intergalactic space is famously devoid of both of these things. And the longer your mission is, the greater the chance of a critical failure at some point. Even if that chance is small, if you're going to take millions upon millions of years to get there most of your probes might not reach. Travelling slow comes with its own costs and impracticalities.

And yeah, I know every single one of these problems can be solved by invoking [hypothetical future technology], and I'm sure the future will unceremoniously spit in the face of any prediction I make, but I'm not too convinced by any explanation that relies too heavily on handwavium.

And you can send a lot of probes -- depending on how small they can be and how efficient their propulsion is, even a very high loss rate can just be overcome with quantity. Another advantage of not having precious primates on board!

Yes, I agree, even with a high loss rate you could spread your probes as long as there's a nonzero probability of survival. As I said, the idea you posited is not out of the question. Of course, then the Fermi paradox rears its head, since not only are we seeing no sign of alien life from our own galaxy, but also from other galaxies and other galaxy clusters which should hypothetically be able to reach us.

Why would the outpost be dead? Galaxy-brained superintelligences don't seem like likely to be mercurial creatures that might just die off one day from a plague or civil war or something. Once they're established, I assume they're gonna be here till the end of time.

I'm not saying it would be dead, I'm more saying that communicating would be full of latency problems - any information you'd get from it wouldn't be timely at all and would be mostly of little value since it'd be impossible to act on. The point was that for all you know the outpost could be dead and you'd only know 11.4 million years later.

I think humanity is going to let go of our sentimental attachment to meat-based life basically as soon as we have a digital alternative

Personally, I wouldn't do it. Even assuming that you can replicate the phenomenon of consciousness in a non-biological substrate (something that could be the case but that's basically impossible to prove), there's the issue of continuity when you're uploading your brain. Sure, there's another version of myself now, but this is not me and I will not experience the change. I will live and die as meat-based life, and there will not be any "transfer" of consciousness. There will not be any change in my own state except now I possess the knowledge that there is an immortal version of me running around out there.

So this is not because I have any attachment to meat-based life - the benefits of a digital substrate would be very tantalising if I could genuinely transfer myself into it. Rather, I think my experience of being me is so intrinsically linked with my physical body that they basically can't be disconnected from each other. The incentive to digitise my brain kind of starts looking very weak then.

but even if we don't, as you say, presumably your Von Neumann probes could build "human manufactories" on the other side of their voyage, even from digitally reconstituted genomes from our local group, in which case I don't see why they'd be any less "ours" than whatever distant descendants clambered off of a successful million year generation ship after it arrived on the other side of the cosmic ocean.

The issue for me is that you don't actually get to colonise anywhere, nobody leaves, you just make another galaxy cluster full of humans. Maybe this is just an irreconcilable values difference, but I think this solution completely voids the point of the exercise. I don't intrinsically care about creating as many humans as possible and distributing them throughout the galaxy. I care infinitely more about where these humans come from.

Anyway... if I'm right about the trajectory of our species, how much of our light cone do you think we could in principle colonize? That's the interesting question IMO.

Let's assume we can go at, say, 50% light speed (149896.229 km/s). The expansion of the universe is 68 km/s/Mpc, and the value of Mpc that gives us a recession speed of 0.5c (the relevant formula here is 68 x Mpc = 149896.229) is 2204.36 megaparsecs, which translates to roughly 7 billion light years. Everything outside that distance is receding from us faster than that.

It's basically Hubble's law. You can take any speed of travel, divide it by the expansion rate, and find the distance beyond which everything is receding from you faster than your travel speed. There's probably additional complexity created by the aforementioned fact that the Hubble "constant" is not actually constant and is decreasing, but I can't be arsed to factor that in right now.

Personally, I wouldn't do it. Even assuming that you can replicate the phenomenon of consciousness in a non-biological substrate (something that could be the case but that's basically impossible to prove), there's the issue of continuity when you're uploading your brain. Sure, there's another version of myself now, but this is not me and I will not experience the change. I will live and die as meat-based life, and there will not be any "transfer" of consciousness. There will not be any change in my own state except now I possess the knowledge that there is an immortal version of me running around out there.

My typical rejoinder is basically, how do you know this isn't happening every time you go to sleep -- that "you" die and a new "you" comes into existence when your body and brain awake the next morning, a brand new consciousness tricked by your brain's memories into inferring false continuity of self? Or even that this isn't happening thirty times per second as part of your brain's natural operation?

My other rejoinder is, how about a Moravec Procedure, where you remain conscious and lucid the entire time during your gradual upload, in each moment satisfied (and confirming via repeated formal consent) that your consciousness has not changed?

The issue for me is that you don't actually get to colonise anywhere, nobody leaves, you just make another galaxy cluster full of humans. Maybe this is just an irreconcilable values difference, but I think this solution completely voids the point of the exercise. I don't intrinsically care about creating as many humans as possible and distributing them throughout the galaxy. I care infinitely more about where these humans come from.

Indeed, perhaps an irreconcilable values difference, but I think there's something ineffably beautiful about a quest to awaken the dead matter of the universe into sentience.

Fortunately, it's very cheap! The cost of sending von neumann probes beyond the radius of a given civilization sphere is likely to be low relative to the wealth of mass-energy contained within the sphere. That is true even when our sphere is just the earth, and becomes only more true as the sphere expands. Even if 99% of the sentiences or "mind-share" of the civilization agrees with you, the remaining 1% could probably fund the expedition as a hobby.

Let's assume we can go at, say, 50% light speed (149896.229 km/s). The expansion of the universe is 68 km/s/Mpc, and the value of Mpc that gives us a recession speed of 0.5c (the relevant formula here is 68 x Mpc = 149896.229) is 2204.36 megaparsecs, which translates to roughly 7 billion light years. Everything outside that distance is receding from us faster than that.

A 7 billion light year radius is pretty damn good, I'd say! We're well outside our local group and have begun eating superclusters like potato chips at that point!

Did anyone watch Edgerunners? First TV show I'd seen in a long time thanks to being sick for a few days (and it only being ~200min long).

Turned out to be enjoyable, despite disliking the whole cyberpunk genre. Part of that is just studio Trigger being bloody good at what they do, having a great variety of music that apparently came from the game OST, and seemingly minimal meddling from Netflix. They absolutely nailed the setting as far as I'm familiar with it, and faithfully adapted the cool aesthetic of the game despite a limited budget. The ending was... The only way it could have been.

Not something I'd want to watch all the time, and some of the plot was a bit dumb, but the characters were pretty good (I can see why everyone thinks the handy and smashable mesugaki is best girl).

If you need subs, it might be better to wait for a new fan version, because the official ones are weird. Not in a "anime girl says death to gamergate and the patriarchy" they/them Funimation localizer kind of way, just really loose and slangy to the point of being a rewrite on occasion. Mixing cringy CP "nova choom roblox chrome gonk" slang with calling people boomers is not a great combi.

Also, how has nobody ever done the cyberpunk hacker madly typing at two keyboards and a dozen screens thing, then cut to it being all stackexchange questions. I want some realism for once, damn it.

Loved Edgerunners! Plot was kinda sparse at times as you note, but I chalk it up to short runtime.

The slang they use in the subs is likely due to the thing being totally localized, may even have been designed english-first. It's all very true to the Night City setting; I think a lot of that gets lost in the Japanese translation, and so there might be weird disparities if you're watching japanese dub english sub.

I just watched English dub (basically never do in other anime) and found the vernacular to be a cool part of the worldbuilding. Maybe helps if you've played the game, though.

I recently watched a series on YouTube about card counting. It was made by this English fella, who was a complete beginner at card counting. He just learned the basics and then went to the US, with a large amount of money backed by a friend, and then traveled around to casinos to play blackjack.

I knew nothing about card counting beforehand, but it was an interesting insight into a somewhat unique lifestyle. It is also very entertaining to see the bullshit the casinos try to pull when he is backed off.

There are 12 videos of about 20 minuttes each. I would say it is well worth a watch.

playlist

Is the time investment so high as to require a 'lifestyle' ? I thought it was something poor but brave MIT students did over summer break.

That was also kind of what I thought, and you can definitely do that, but it is unlikely to make any significant amount of money. The edge you get from counting cards is very small, so it requires a lot of playing to make good money. You also need a decent bankroll so you can endure losing streaks.

Combine that with being backed off from playing, sometimes while you are at a loss. At one point he is backed off while down thousands of dollars. It is not easy.

It is also very much a life on the road. Casinos will ban you from entering them, so you have to travel. On top of that they circulate information about suspected card counters, so getting backed off in one can result in not being able to play at others in the same area. He teams up with five other card counters so they can pool their money and hit casinos that others are banned from.

I don’t think you have to be brave necessarily, but you definitely have to be comfortable with confrontation. A couple of times he has the cops called on him even, though he has done nothing illegal. You would assume the casino knows this, but they do it anyway, so I guess it is an attempt to intimidate him into not cashing out.

I really do not like the commercialization of holiday songs and symbols.

The greatness of a holiday song is that the song is a unique cue for the spirit of the holiday. By only playing the song during the holiday, the song transfers onto itself the memories of the holiday. This transference also applies to holiday symbols.

When commercials and shops and other things begin to incorporate those songs and symbols, they no longer act as a unique cue, making it harder to access the unique memories of the holiday that were previously stored in the song (via memory interference). This doesn’t happen immediately, consciously, or fully, but it happens to a degree. The result is a chipping away of all the greatness and joy.

Like, if you begin to play your favorite song as a wake up alarm, over time the song begins to encode for the stress of waking up. With some mental effort you can remember why you liked the song originally and what it meant, but it’s not the same! There’s a small rewiring when we remember. Remembering is re-memory-ing.

I’ve been thinking of incorporating into my life “clear unique cues”, for lack of better terminology. A small little enclave of only joy, or serenity, with cues only for that space which I do not use in other contexts. The result should be a maximization of the potential of the space for its intended purpose.

I suppose this should make me happy that one of .y favorite Christmas songs was a total commercial failure, but I'd still prefer to hear it a little more often.

Basshunter's Jingle Bells?

Dido's Christmas Day it's not really a Christmas song but does mention the holiday, but that's the first time I've heard that Jingle bells, I like it.

So I thought I'd have my adlib tracker done by now, but UI programming in assembly is a giant pain in my dick.

I got the data format I want for the songs figured out. Plus, I got interrupt based playback of songs done in a manner I'm pretty happy with. Reprogrammed the PIT, and let the assembler calculate the correct rate to call the original INT08 handler. My handler also knows how often to call the song player based on how many BPM are configured at runtime. So that's nice.

Programming the instruments for the adlib is pretty simple as well, and I'm probably halfway through the UI for doing so? I found an old program called TheDraw which can spit out a screen you've designed in it as the exact binary data you'd load into video memory. So that was a huge convenience. I can load that finally directly into B800:0000 or whichever page I'm using. After that it's just detecting clicks and redrawing what portions of the screen I need to.

Still have to figure out the UI I want to actually program the notes. But I'm on a good track. In fact, the assembly I've been writing works correctly the first time probably about 50% of the time and rising. Hurray!

Once I finish this, maybe I'll start actually working on the game I want.

An interesting AI-generated music video.

I hope this is more Fun than Culture War, but She Hulk spoilers below:

Most of the show was very episodic. There were several episodes where I remarked to my husband that there were no outstanding plot threads that I could see and if the show ended there I wouldn't care. There were also many episodes where the highlight of the show was anyone but the main character. Wong, Matt, Abomination, everyone else at the law firm.

The finale went for a big merging of a bunch of disparate elements into one tropey climatic fight. And then they did the biggest lampshade hanging I've seen outside of crappy fanfiction. Basically the writers admitted that the story they wrote sucked, that Marvel Studios cannot make anything original or interesting, and that the direction of the MCU is literally written by an algorithm to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But they seemed to think that pointing this out somehow absolves them and made She Hulk good.

Did anyone else watch the show? Did I miss something? Did the lampshade hanging work for anyone?

I refuse to consume any franchise-milking media. People shat on Scorsese, but he was basically right: there's already too much content in the world, and we shouldn't busy ourselves with something explicitly designed to be sold from the ground up.

Why do you have to refuse ?

Most of it is either intensely boring or offensively stupid. Somehow our NAS ended up having some Avengers films and we watched one and I think I fell asleep doing so. Somehow, none of it seems interesting. All so contrived.

Principles are there to lighten cognitive load. I don't have to worry about whether to watch something or not. MCU? Pass. Disney Star Wars? Pass. Expanded universe anything? Pass.

I guess we basically agree; it'd never occur to me to watch these because I found it a snoozefest , and you refuse to watch it because it's proven to be commercialised crap made with little care to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Of the recent Marvel Shows, the one I liked the most was Hawkeye. I enjoyed Agents of Shield, but wouldn't claim it was worth anyone else's time.

I thought Daredevil season 1 was great though so we probably have very different tastes.

I did not watch the show, but one of my buddies raved about the breaking of the 4th wall and how awesome it was. Sort of intriguing but not nearly enough for me to slog through a season of anything.

Breaking the fourth wall was done in an amusing manner and was entertaining at least. It was just empty. It's like eating cotton candy on an empty stomach. It was amusing at the time but a bad choice overall.

Most positive thing I will say about the finale:

They tried something different and a lot of people will never do that.

I do not mind She-Hulk talking to the audience. She was doing that before Deadpool. But robbing the audience of a pay-off as a joke is, well, quite unsatisfying.

They said that they were dealing with Jennifer Walter's problems in her life, but then all the problems magically went away. I was going to be happy that they were not solved in a big cinematic CGI fight, but there was nothing. There was not even an explanation for her getting her job back, how she changed into She-Hulk at the end, why Titania showed up, or why Titania is now at least on her side.

On Titania, I expected her to be on Jen's side at the end, all the way from episode 1, since no woman is ever really a bad guy in a chick flick, but the explanation is "lol so zany if this happened".

There's a difference between breaking the fourth wall, which I appreciate, and lampshade hanging, which I find amusing in small quantities. It's just irritating when 'bad writing' is the thing they are explicitly hanging a lampshade over.

The "no resolution" thing bothers me. We didn't need a massive fight, we didn't need to see Jen argue with K.E.V.I.N. We needed to see Jen work through her self esteem issues relating to her job and social life and that was never addressed in a satisfactory way. Her getting together with Matt felt rushed.

Terra Invicta Review

This was initially going to be a shorter post but it turned into an unedited, error filled rant about all the things that annoy me about a game that the vast majority of you haven’t and won’t play. But maybe you’ll enjoy it away.

Overview

Terra Invicta is a 4X grand strategy game that was recently released into early access recently, and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time playing recently. The game is the first original release from Pavonis Interactive, the team who made the Long War mods for the modern XCOM games. The premise of the game is that you take control of one of seven factions/organisations/ideologies following the discovery of a crashed UFO, the beginning of an arrival/invasion of aliens in the Sol System. Each of the factions responds to the aliens in their own way and have their own win condition, with some factions even being ‘pro-alien’. The gameplay of Terra Invicta is hard to explain. It’s kind of two game separate games stitched together, the first being a escape/grand strategy (Paradox) like game where you fight with other factions (and aliens) for control of Earth’s nations, which provide you resources, and the second being control of space that plays like more a traditional space 4X, where you have to build space stations (‘habs’), mine resources and build ships, and fight in real time space battles.

Thematically, Terra Invicta is most directly inspired by XCOM (duh!) in the setting of the game (but not that much in gameplay). Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (and Civilization) is also a heavy influence, particularly in the writing. There are also similarities to Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War franchises. Yes, I’m aware that sounds confusing! Terra Invictia is a very ambitious strategy game that attempts to really capture the grand scope of how humans might respond to an alien invasion. In this ambition, it mostly succeeds, however, it is quite rough around the edges, and not just a way that can be fixed in early access. The writing in the game is pretty mediocre, some of the Earth grand strategy elements are shallow, and the space combat is pretty horrible that a significant rework looks likely. Despite all this, I strongly recommend Terra Invicta if you enjoy the above games, and it a great first release for a development studio. Even though it is early access, the game is feature complete and mostly bug free.

Gameplay

I won’t spend too long describing gameplay, it’s easy enough to search for footage online, it’s time better spent on specific critique but a brief summary: You take the role of one seven factions with their own goals. You play as the omnipotent disembodied leader of one of seven factions each with their own ideologies. The seven factions are:

  • The Resistance – default ‘XCOM’ defend the Earth from aliens faction

  • Humanity First – a violent militaristic xenophobic faction willing to use extreme methods to kill the aliens

  • The Academy – a idealistic faction that wishes to prove humanity the alien’s equal and enter peaceful relations

  • Project Exodus – a faction that wants to GTFO and abandon Earth and escape to a new star system

  • The Initiative – a kleptocratic faction only concerned with using chaos to increase their own wealth and power

  • The Protectorate – a faction who wishes to appease the aliens to avoid bloodshed and preserve some degree human autonomy

  • The Servants – a religious cult faction that sees the aliens as humanity’s saviours and will outright support the aliens (and the aliens them)

I will discuss the factions, their leaders, and how they are written later on (it’s not good).

Each faction has up to 6 ‘councillors’ which is your primary way of interacting with Earth and the nations of the world. These councillors all have a range of different missions which interact with the nations of Earth and other factions in different ways, ranging from taking control of a nation and its armies, raising or reducing civil unrest in those nations, assassinating enemy councillors, or steal enemy research. This all takes place on a Paradox-style globe. Each nation has stats like population, GDP, education level, unrest etc. Control over a nation is dictated by control of a nation’s ‘control points’, which allow you to control how it invests its ‘economy’ (investment points), and its foreign policy and armies. The primary reason to control nations is that they are the primary source of money, research (to unlock new technologies like any 4X), and ‘boost’ (abstracted resource representing ability to send thing into space). All these are needed to launch build space stations to mine resources (metal, gases) to design and build spaceships which constitutes the second ‘half’ of the game. Space combat is a 3D real time with pause – think Homeworld without the base management or spaceship Total War (there’s probably better comparisons). It also uses Newtonian mechanics for movement, and pretty fleshed out orbital mechanics to move around the Solar system. To win the game you need to complete a specific victory condition for your chosen faction that will be discovered as you play, which often but not always involves blowing up a lot of the alien’s shit.

Now to the more interesting ‘critique’ (read: rant filled criticism about stuff that annoys me about the game):

The spaceship combat is quite bad in its current state. There are two primary issues – first, the waypoint system. You control all your ships in combat via ‘waypoints’, a line that shows your ship’s current trajectory (Newtonian mechanics), which has several points on it which represents points on which your ship can adjust its course (orientation and thrust). This sounds good on paper, but quickly becomes micromanagement hell. It’s actually pretty fun for like 2v2 skirmishes, but when you’re trying to manage 20+ ships it’s just tedious. The alternative is almost as bad though - setting the ships to AI control. The AI control is both hilariously bad and lacking in options. You have no control how the AI ship actually acts. You can’t for example, assign your smaller corvettes only defend and screen for your capital ships. It’s either AI or it isn’t. And the preferred strategy of the AI seems to be rushing full speed ahead into the enemy and getting itself killed. So your choice in ship combat is either tedious micromanagement, or braindead AI. Fortunately, the developers are aware of this problem and there’s probably going to be a substantial overhaul of space combat at some point.

Bad AI also extends to the enemy factions too. The humanity faction AI mismanages the nations it controls really badly, and this results in them stagnating in the midgame, causing the player the surpass them very quickly and leave only the aliens as the real opposition.

The game is incredibly long. Some people might think this is a positive, but even as a veteran of Paradox grand strategy who is used to hundred-hour campaigns, Terra Invicta is just too long. I’ve got over a hundred hours in the game and have not come close to actually finishing a campaign. A big culprit of this is the bloated and overly engineered and complicated technology system (much of the early ship technology is useless anyway), which has hundreds of technologies and engineering projects. There are significant stretches of time where you’ll be nothing but waiting for tech to complete. But can’t just completely zone out and go full speed, because the requires you to micro your councillors constantly. There’s also a significant bottleneck for research in the midgame and if you don’t go down certain paths before than others you can waste a lot of time, despite the apparent gameplay freedom that is the design intent of the developers.

The grand strategy/geoscape parts are surprisingly shallow and feel very boardgamey. A major reason for this is that there is nothing really unique about any given country. They are all just the same pile of numbers that happen to start at different points of a scale. There’s actually no mechanical difference between China and the USA, China just happens to have lower education and democracy score but more population than the USA. If you democratize and education China using the same relatively shallow mechanics available to all countries, then you just end up with bigger USA. Things like migration, religion, sectarian or ethnic divides in a country aren’t modelled at all. And things that are modelled like democracy/government score or education are just simply points on a scale. You can pretty easily make Israel and Iran allies for example. It’s all just completely abstracted game mechanics that are the almost exactly same for all countries. It’s a board game where there’s a square that happens to be called India, but there’s nothing uniquely Indian about it, only abstracted gamified statistics of India. This is part of both the strength and weakness of Terra Invicta – it is an ambitious game with enormous scope, but any given specific mechanics is poorly developed.

I think a major problem with the game design as it stands, is despite the freedom in how you approach the game’s many mechanics, you’re ultimately pigeonholed into a rough playstyle and a predetermined victory condition. Many of the games I mentioned in the summary either are sandbox oriented and don’t have true win conditions (Paradox), or have multiple win conditions (Alpha Centauri/Civilization). In Terra Invicta, this means you can’t adjust adapt your plan to win based on the circumstances of the game or what you find the most enjoyable. In Civilization, sure you might be incentivised to go for a certain win condition based on which civilization you pick, but you always have the freedom to change. This I think really hurts the enjoyment of the game through limiting player options.

Continued below....

I wrote maybe half a post about TI last week and never sent it because it seemed kind of unfair to criticize a game I've played and (mostly!) enjoyed for a hundred hours. It's deeply flawed and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone unless you're already so deep down the GSG rabbit hole you know what you're getting into. Yet it does so many truly novel, interesting things, in a setting that may be poorly written and poorly explored (although, as far as video games go, I don't think it's that bad, it's just not even close to the greats) but still compelling -- I think it's worth playing.

I think you're pretty on point. See my earlier comment that mostly agrees with you: https://www.themotte.org/post/21/just-playin/11879?context=8#context

I also wrote a review for detailing every thing wrong with the game that I encountered. It ended up being not just too long for steam but too long for me to bother proofreading it, so I scrapped it.

The game is full of problems, the writing is abysmal, but in the end I'm still happy that it's been made. It's ambitious, it's challenging, it's innovative. If only it were also rewarding.

I have always wanted to have a Newtonian spaceship combat game but figured it would be too hard to manage. Are there better candidates here?

The old elite games had newtonian flight sim space combat, there was a lot of swooping past each other, but it was amazing in a high thrust ship.

Specifically Frontier (Elite 2) and Frontier: First Encounters (effectively an expansion to Frontier but sold as a separate game to try and wriggle out of a contract). The original Elite didn't have Newtonian flight.

Children of a Dead Earth if you want a sim.

Star Ruler if you want a 4X.

Did CoaDE ever get any updates? I was really hoping he'd keep going with more scenarios.

AFAIK not, no.

It's amazing how all the criticisms of long war seem to have anticipated this game, except with the potential for failure unbound by the limits of hex-editing XCOM.exe.

Thanks for the review. Sounds like a game that can't be fixed by fleshing out mechanics, but only stripping out all the pointless ones the Good Idea Fairy mailed in.

Come to think of it, xcom:lw was what made me realize how pointless games are. I can't boot one up any more without hearing Shen go "This is what the aliens do for fun? At least they're not playing... computer games".

Continued

I’ve been very critical and to say something positive because I actually do enjoy the game, one of the things the game does very well is dynamic difficulty. While there are actual difficulty settings, the game has mechanics to dynamically adjust the difficulty as the aliens’ activity is in part driven by your own activity. The more aggressive you are, the more aggressive the aliens will be in response. It’s also hard to outright lose the game, and there’s almost always an opportunity to recover and claw back victory, even if it might be slow and tedious. XCOM’s Long War indeed!

Factions and Writing

In Terra Invicta, you a playing as one of seven competing factions. However, it’s never exactly made quite clear what the factions/organisations even are. The presentation really lacks the context to make it clear, it’s all completely abstracted to the point where it diminishes the experience. The game aesthetically presents the factions as Illuminati like clandestine organisations pulling the strings of government from the behind the curtain. But much of the gameplay doesn’t reflect that at all, and in practice it seems like you’re more like a inter or pseudo governmental body that unites a bunch of nations under a geopolitical bloc. But this is also undermined by the fact it’s relatively easy to oust a faction from a country and seize control yourself. Some of the mechanics of the game imply you’re not exactly secret to the public. But it’s never quite clear what you are. The game is this weird halfway position between the two positions. This is made worse by the fact the origins of the factions are just handwaved way. Apparently, there were seven secret organisations who all just happened waiting around for aliens to appear so they start taking over countries. The predetermined victory condition/ideology of the factions is also adding to this issue because the factions, even the non-fanatical ones, already have their set-in-stone attitude to the aliens before even knowing anything about them, that doesn’t change after learning anything about them. It all feels a bit artificial and ‘teleological’ I guess. Also, all the factions are mechanically identical despite their organisations presumably differing significantly, like the Servants being a weird religious cult and the Initiative being some dog-eat-dog corporate Illuminati.

Terra Invicta is most directly influenced by Alpha Centauri by its writing and faction leaders. Like AC, each faction is represented by a leader, who is explored whose perspective, background and ideology is slowly explored through a voiced acted quote that appear after researching each technology from one of the leaders. However, unlike Alpha Centauri which has some fantastic writing, touches on complex ideas and provides believable ideological justifications for each of the factions, the writing in Terra Invicta is mediocre and shallow. The vast majority of quotes from the factions leaders are just bad, mostly in the asinine ‘I’m a teenager and think this is a deep observation about humanity’ kind. They never really say anything that meaningful. All the leaders are ultimately boring caricatures. Unfortunately, I can’t find any list of quotes from the game at this stage. I’m going to list the faction leaders from roughly most annoying to least annoying and describe them and their issues.

The Resistance – Commander Fiona Ayouade, a black Bri’ish woman with an extremely annoying (north?) London accent. She is apparently an experienced counterterrorist expert, although you wouldn’t know it because she has the most asinine comments imaginable mostly about ‘why can’t humans just work together’. Sounds more like a young arts school undergraduate student.

The Protectorate – Commissioner Kiran Banerjee, an Indian human rights lawyer/politician who is like an unintentional caricature of what a conservative imagines a bleeding-heart liberal to be. All his quotes are asinine quotes about people being selfish or shallow environmentalism and everything is dangerous and could be used to abuse people. He’s also gay, which I guess the game doesn’t make a big deal out of, but he also happens to be the only character in the game whose relationship is ever mentioned in quotes.

The Servants – Superior Judith Howell, an American who is an odd amalgamation of new age mystic and cultish Evangalical Christian. Seems woefully underqualified for leading whatever the faction organisation is meant to be. Her quotes are mostly boring attempts for the writer to sound religious or spiritual. A lot of meaningless and repetitive quotes about cleansing and purification that don’t say anything.

The Initiative – Chairman Soren Van Wyk, an extremely unethical Afrikaner businessman (arms, diamonds), who is almost comically evil (very original). Literally every quote from him is some variation of “Fuck [ethical thing], just make me more money or give me more power”. No depth, completely one note and boring.

The Academy – Chancellor Li Qingzhao, female Chinese extremely influential scientist. Her quotes are relatively inoffensive, mostly just quotes about science and how technology is awesome and great but not saying anything substantial. Sometimes comments on society but it’s all bland liberal technocrat stuff about we can overcome division through knowledge and understanding.

Humanity First - Colonel Hanse Castille, an Argentinian military officer turned commando after alleged war crimes. Mostly just waxes about how there’s danger everywhere, some military strategy themed quotes that’s probably not even true (‘sometimes it’s not about who has the bigger gun but can shoot faster’ or some bs like that), and sometimes comments about how humans must be hard asses. Cliché and uninspired but not offensively bad.

Project Exodus – Director Khalid Al-Ashgar. Oxford educated Emirati space tech mogul. Idealist who wants to leave Earth and explore space. Has the most inoffensive quotes of the lot mostly about how we must dream big and leave the cradle of Earth, and a few quotes about sciencey stuff.

Just to give a taste here’s a couple of quotes from my least favourite leader Fiona Ayouade (imagine an annoying female northern London accent):

“Together, we’re stronger. Apart, we’re weaker, yeah? Sounds great on paper, love, but the trouble is there’s always some bloke with a loud voice who wants to keep as apart – and a whole lot of someone elses bankrolling him”

“When I was a kid, the threat of nuclear Armageddon was on every front page, every day. So forgive me if I get just a tiny bit anxious when you tell me that our best hope of sailing the stars is staging nuclear explosions inside our spacecraft!” - (She's a professional logical mature counterterrrorist operative btw)

By comparison, here’s some quotes from the game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Sure, there are some duds there (the expansion factions suck ass) but the quality of the writing is just so much higher. With all respect to the Terra Invicta writer(s), it seems like they just didn’t have the philosophical chops to emulate what Alpha Centauri did. Alpha Centauri was also smart enough to use some real world quotes too (like all Civilization games do), rather than trying to come up with some witty original insight to say about everything.

Even the names of the factions suck and are so generic. They're literally just called the Resistance or the Academy or whatever. They could have at least called them like 'United Earth Defense Organisation' or something, and have Resistance be a nickname.

Also a quick note on the Aliens, who I haven’t commented much on. I want to avoid spoiling their motivations for invading Earth and who they are because discovering it is a major part of the experience. My opinion is that the answer to that question is meh, and like a lot of the other writing it’s superficially deep.

Real World Politics

To go on a tangent and to veer briefly into the culture war a bit in the end, what I always find interesting about games like Terra Invicta that have a grand, contemporary, and somewhat realistic setting is how the mechanics and initial game state of the game reflects the ideological biases of the developers and perhaps maybe wider society in general. The previous section on the factions and how they’re written might provide some insights. The game starts on 1 October, 2022. It includes contemporary geopolitical events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Taiwan has a special relationship with China (which is also used as a generic mechanic for breakaway states. You can look at things like how democratic the devs rate a given country at game start (perhaps they used some democracy index). But more interesting things might be what they chose to affect population growth (i.e. fertility) – low GDP per capita and education have high birth rates, but in developed countries increasing GDP per capita increases population growth.

Migration is completely absent from the game, something you might think there would be a lot of if there were alien invasions of Earth, or even just extreme ideologies taking over nations. I don’t know if this was a conscious social decision not to include it or just because the developers thought it would be too complex to introduce.

Interestingly, Palestine is completely absent from the game. They don’t even have a claim to the region that Israel has. Civil wars and sectarian conflict in general are modelled extremely poorly. Because Israel has high democracy score and relatively high GDP per capita and education, most of the unrest Israel starts the game with that presumably represents Palestinian conflict disappears by itself pretty quickly because of how the game mechanics work. In fairness to the developers, I suspect that there might be a legitimate mechanical issue in having two countries have exact sam

Addendum - The Static Nature of the World

Something I kind of touched on in the gameplay section but didn't really expand on is how static the world feels. The nations in the games don't actually do anything of their own accord, things only happen when the factions make things happen. There's not really any true dynamic systems. It doesn't feel like a lived in world.

Additionally, the game doesn't really illustrate how what human society looks likes in the aftermath of alien contact, invasion, and rapid technological advancement. At best, you're given of couple of snippets of text explaining what the technology does and how it might affect society when you unlock it. But you never feel it or have it materially impact the world. As far as we are concerned, the world and society at large remains mostly the same as it is now ~40 years into the future. We don't really get any changing game mechanics about how nations work or anything. This is despite the introduction of technologies like self-programming AI, quantum computing, virtually unlimited clean energy in the form of cheap mass fusion technology and so on. Game terms these things mostly just translate into like 5% bonuses to investment in economy and welfare. The lack of vision in how society might materially change due to the events of the game is pretty disappointing.

Climate Change

One of the biggest political issues I forgot to mention is climate change is modelled in the game, with is providing an ongoing drain on world GDP supposedly representing the costs of adapting to a changing climate. It is possible to invest points into 'Welfare' which includes removing a minor amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. However, and this is where the game becomes expressly political/ideological, is that the game doesn't want you (and doesn't let you) actually solve climate change, you can only slow it down. Even techs expressly designed to address climate change like designer organisms and carbon capture technology do very little to address the problem. This is a deliberate choice from the developers as I've seen it been discussed, because despite being set in an timeline where mass advanced AI, nuclear fusion and plasma weaponry are quickly invented and adopted, apparently we can't develop a similar solution for climate change. The developers, and many of the fans who have argued about it in the forums and discord, believe in some green radical social change is the only way to deal with climate change and have inserted that view into their advanced sci-fi setting.

The developers, and many of the fans who have argued about it in the forums and discord, believe in some green radical social change is the only way to deal with climate change and have inserted that view into their advanced sci-fi setting.

It's a general trend I notice that those who have some extremely strong ideological convictions about a topic, especially those who have almost no nuance in their worldview and can't steelman and inhabit alternative points of view, are almost never able to craft realistic worlds and narratives when it comes to their topic of interest. This is not necessarily a stock "politics in entertainment is bad" position, rather it's more that worldbuilding and the politics in it have to be handled carefully and can't feel like you are being aggressively force-fed a position or point of view. It's especially bad when the writers are tackling very different settings with very different material and technological conditions from ours and yet still feel the need to shoehorn Current Year politics into things.

It's for that reason that I think it's a good rule of thumb to politically disengage as much as possible when one tackles fiction, and if they do have politics one should make sure they organically arise from the groundwork they've set instead of trying to create allegories and messages that pertain to our current environment. The latter approach to things simply does not work, in my opinion, and ends up feeling ridiculously out of place and quite preachy.

Interestingly, Palestine is completely absent from the game.

It'd makes sense looking at the potential markets. These games are usually played by smarter people, inbreeding lowers IQ in a major way, so mid East just isn't really a potential market.

Sure, some leftists may get mad at you, but you know what they say about free publicity..

Comparing it to Alpha Centauri seems almost unfair; considering it's probably the game with the most philosophical depth of all games, ever. It's not a coincidence that Scott frequently inserts references to it in his posts (click the colon characters in his review of Albion's Seed, or read Unsong, where I noticed at least one chapter deal with and directly reference concepts introduced in SMAC e.g. the quote from a "wise woman" here, a reference to this).

The chief difference I think is that the writers clearly had a whole bunch of genuinely interesting ideas stewing in their heads that they wanted to express, and chose the computer game medium to do so. Other games have a plot and then attempt to come up with "deep" ideas after the fact, something which almost always fail.

(Tangentially, If you've played it and enjoyed it as much as I did, I can recommend this blog containing in-depth analysis of basically every quote in the game.)

Yeah, AC is a beast when it comes to writing in video games. Or, hell, writing in sci-fi in general.

And it seems to have cast a shadow on every 4X set on a planet's surface to come. Pax Nova, Beyond Earth, Planetfall, Terra Invicta. They all attempt the AC thing without having any of the necessary skills, and it cheapens the experience to a very noticeable degree. If they cannot even tell that they are out of their depth in writing, then why should I trust them on game design? Why play a game that will probably just waste my time, just as it wasted my attention with those crappy quotes?

I agree, and I would be more forgiving if it wasn't for the fact the game seems to be heavily drawing from Alpha Centauri in their faction design and presentation. It's pretty obvious. They set themselves up for unfavourable comparisons.

Yeah if your writing chops aren't impeccable, it's a bad idea to make a 4X sci fi game with ideological factions. I didn't even like SMAC, and I know that much. I'm color blind and the colors on the early map made exploration quite difficult the alien life that killed most early units was indistinguishable from the predominant map color. A few months later they released a color blind patch to change them.

Oh, that blog series is excellent, I've read it before. One of the things I loved about the original seven factions is that every one has a point to make, somewhere, and even though all of them are easily summarized in a few words, there's depth to the characterization that often comes as a surprise. It's easy to dismiss Sister Miriam as a religious zealot (and she is), but the common accusation that she's a Luddite is misaimed--she thinks technological development often has moral implications that should be understood before adoption (cough looking at you, Zakharov). Similarly, Chairman Yang, the Communist/Hive organizer, has some interesting philosophical thoughts about the nature of humanity and consciousness in a post-Singularity context. Each of the faction heads may be wrong--and you can usually point to pretty clear cases where they are--but none of them are trivial. (Sadly, the expansion writing is much less good.)

Oh, dynamic difficulty is a good choice. I suggested that to the original team way back in LW1, to avoid the "steamroll or die" problem that rewarded gamey strategies and trivialized the extremely drawn-out endgame. But they just tried to nerf all the good strats while balancing around people using them, turning the meta into exploiting the few things they couldn't control: breaking the AI with tedious LOS manipulation, pack activation mechanics, etc.

The sad part is that XCOM had a great lore justification for dynamic difficulty. Since the whole campaign is a test or experiment by the aliens for their new slave race, showing more promise should make them ramp up the pressure, and vice versa.

Didn't LW1 actually have elements of dynamic difficulty? It's been a while so I don't recall the datails, but I'm sure there was something.

Dynamic difficulty is something that I wish more games would attempt. Steamrolling and getting steamrolled after having invested hours into a campaign is always a very disappointing ending.

That said, IMO TI gets some things about it right and some horribly wrong.

The good: You can almost always come back from losses. You can always hire new councilors, take over small countries and work your way up, start a new space program.

The bad: And sometimes you can't, or the AI can't, and then there's still a very, very long game ahead of you. Sometimes the factions just run the Earth's economy into the ground and there's nothing to be done about the alien invasion. Sometimes you manage to unite all the Earth's nations into a few superblobs and retain control of all of them and all the other factions are now unable to do a damn thing. Sometimes you accidentally annoy the aliens prematurely and they lock down space forever, GG.

I stopped playing after the .12 nerfs, and didn't follow 1.0 at all, so they might have added it. But the mid-dev versions had a fixed difficulty curve timetable you could get ahead of: cheese an early supply ship and the Zhang missions, get early mecs & laser intis, and the rest of the game was just smashing endless UFO crash sites and milking exalt missions for meld.

Edit: I only just remembered that there was a reverse difficulty scaling mechanic in Alien Research, which made the aliens harder the poorer you were doing, and vice versa. If you were smashing it the aliens would fall behind on their tech curve and get even easier (even losing the ability to do terror missions). If you lost soldiers or failed to stop UFOs they would start showing up with 60 HP mechtoids against your basic rifles.

It was retarded and a big reason I burned out on the game.

The sad part is that XCOM had a great lore justification for dynamic difficulty.

Terra Invicta also kinda has an explanation but it's not great. Just to do spoilers for the alien motivation, which you won't discover the entirety off in every faction's playthough. Spoiler:

The aliens themselves were almost defeated by other aliens, and only barely managed to win. So now they're terrified of all other aliens and seek to enslave them before they can be enslaved themselves. But they're they have a pro-peace political faction of their own that doesn't want to just destroy humans - which I guess ends up being the explanation for dynamic difficulty. The whole reveal of 'the aliens were nearly enslaved themselves which is why they're acting this way to humans/xenophobic' is portrayed as some really deep, and cool reveal ('doesn't it say something deep about society') but really comes off as trite and uninspired to me.

What are people up to that's fun? Myself, I've been playing the recent release of Trails From Zero. It's a game where I already played a fan translation, but the fan translation was pretty rough so it's fun to see what a professional localization effort looks like. The Trails games in general are very long "I hope you like text" games, so this one will take me a bit, but I'm really enjoying it.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for or if this is "fun" in the traditional sense, but I find it fun - I've been focusing on completing a piece of music that's been in the works on and off since March 2021, adding detail to it and fleshing it out. It's quite common for me to have very long track development times (ranging from three months to over a year) and very large projects (over a hundred instrument tracks, at times).

I've also been drafting, planning and writing out some hard sci-fi stories, but these haven't gotten too far because making the stories scientifically plausible and logically sound is not easy. I've been digging into AI, engineering, evolution, biochemistry, astrophysics, planetary science and all sorts of other fields in order to inform what I come up with, which is quite a big task for a layman like me. Trying to write attractive sounding prose is also very difficult (and fairly annoying). Then there's trying to develop the characters - stories have such a huge amount of facets that you really need to perfect if you want something well-rounded.

Other than that, not much. I don't play games myself much (though I used to watch LPs quite a bit), nor do I watch films or shows much anymore unless something sufficiently to my taste comes out or someone else in the room is already watching, so hobbies are usually nearly the entirety of what I do for fun.

I've been doing a no-health-upgrades challenge run of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice the past week. I've made it up to Genichiro (about 40% of the game) after about 8 hours, 3 of which were just stuck on the Blazing Bull. The only other Fromsoft game I played was Bloodborne, which I absolutely loved, and I beat both Bloodborne and Sekiro in their hardest difficulties (or rather, the highest NG+, which are 6 & 7 for them respectively), but I've yet to do a challenge run of this sort, and it's definitely quite something. The enemies may be tougher in NG+, but at least the longer health bar provides decent room for error in fights, whereas on a fresh playthrough with base HP, there's many more one-shot deaths. And having to find/farm upgrades along the way means less access to tactics for cheesing bosses. Only solution is just to get good and consistent enough at the basic deflection gameplay to get through every encounter. It's difficult but exactly the kind of thrill I was looking for when I decided to try this challenge.

Playing dragon’s dogma. It’s a great game if you can get past the janky beginning. Finally got to Bitterblack Isle.

Playing through my first career in the Roguetech mod for Battle tech. It's quite a bit harder than the vanilla game or other mod packs, and supposedly does a good job of emulating the tabletop game.

I finally looped back to Cyberpunk after its bug-filled launch. It's pretty good! There are plenty of flaws, but it's also quite fun, quite beautiful, and has lots of fun options for how to build your character.

Totally agree. Cyberpunk isn't a perfect game by any means, but it has a lot going for it even despite its flaws. Which is not to excuse the buggy state they launched the game in, of course. But now that those issues seem to have been worked out, it's a much different game.

I've been slowly plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I think the end is in sight. I'm on the last chapter. Just having fun doing side quests at the moment. Wrapping up a bunch of side stories with respect to the various colonies.

I'm finding XC3 rather weak in a lot of areas. But one thing it's doing well is having the side quests related to a specific colony tell a cohesive long term story about how that location is coping with the changes you are causing in the world. That said, while I enjoy the narrative arcs of the side quest, their actual construction seems the worst of any XC to date.

That said, I'm finding the combat much more poorly balanced that previous entries in the series. And with far less of a feeling of agency controlling 1 party member out of 6 versus 1 out of 3 in previous games. Enemies, especially enemies you enormously out level, are way to damage spongy. The level caps on the job system severely impact my enjoyment exploring it.

I was watching one review of the game, and they said something I really agreed with. Probably the best part of XC3 is it's restraint. XC2 had some serious weeb cringe, and XC3 corrects for that extremely well.

I'm excited to see the ending, but I'm just not feeling myself and pulled through the game as I did in XC1 or XC2. Instead of being excited to do things in XC3, I find myself settling for the lowest hanging fruit. Ah well.

Yeah, to be honest I found XBC3 to be a real letdown. It wasn't bad, I would say it was a solid 7/10 or 8/10 game. But XBC2 is in my top 5 JRPGs of all time. And XBC1 (while I didn't dig it as much) was still way up there as a top tier game. This game I didn't think lived up to either of its predecessors.

In hindsight I think maybe I just got too hyped up? I was more hyped for XBC3 than for anything else in recent memory. When it came out I did little else in my free time except play. So maybe that just put my expectations too high. I do think that the game has problems even if I hadn't been hyped up, but I may not have felt as let down by the game if I wasn't hyped.

I've played Trails in the Sky 1 and 2, and about a third of 3 before getting bored of it, since it's very different from the first two. I haven't played the other series in the franchise, since I was originally planning to play them all in order, but at this point I don't think I'm going to go back and finish trails in the sky 3. If I do skip ahead, where do you recommend as a new entry point?

I would probably skip to Zero. You will miss some context if you skip Sky 3, because some of the plot in Zero is a pretty direct follow-up to what characters were up to in that game. But you can probably infer what you missed, and be ok. Zero is actually a pretty self contained game overall (unlike Sky FC with its giant cliffhanger), but the characters are a lot of fun and it's needed to set up Azure (which is probably the best game in the series).

If you want, you could also skip to Cold Steel. That's what I did when I first played, since we didn't even have fan translations of the Crossbell games (or Sky 3) at the time. You will have some times (in CS2-4 especially) where the game will reunite you with some of the Crossbell characters and it won't mean much, since you didn't play through those games. But the overall story doesn't rely on playing the Crossbell games to be able to follow what's going on.

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