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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2153 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 20, 2024

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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Should I watch Andor if I hated the sequels (never even bothered with ep 9) but thought Rogue One was more or less alright?

I did try it a while back, based on a weak recommendation from here, as well. Was mostly curious if they managed to make at least one good show under the IP.

I hated it. Paper thin on all fronts.

absolutely. Andor isn't perfect, but it's leagues better than any of the sequels (I also skipped 9), and is probably the best Star Wars material made since the original trilogy.

Cool. I'll check it out.

Anyone else here got UFO 50? What do you think of its attempted homage to the gaming of the 80s? I wasn't around back then, so I'm not terribly invested in the classics.

I'd say Vainger and Party House are my favorites out of the collection so far.

I haven't bought it, but it looks fun. Appropriately priced at $24.99 on Steam. It's a good way for indie developers to experiment with minigames and make a little money. Maybe put a fresh coat of paint on lesser known retro games.

A collection is gonna have its winners and losers. Vainger looks like one of the few that could make it on its own. Velgress looks lively. Seaside Drive looks polished. I'm curious about Valbrace and Grimstone.

I don't really understand the appeal. Partly because I can't imagine devs putting a lot of effort into making 50 good games and then fucking them over by jamming them all in together (clubhouse games stumbled into success and didn't develop any of the games itself). And partly because like @SomethingMusic I am put off by the aesthetic of the early games.

That said, I was tempted to get it when my friend told me Vainger was 'vvvvvv if it was made for the mega drive', vvvvvv was so good.

I recently pulled it off my wish list. I'm sure the games are well designed, but the NES style color palette and style just doesn't appeal to me.

Been playing Mario Oddyssey. Took about two weeks between real life and and casually poking around. Oddyssey is the most entertaining Mario game in existence, and it perfectly strikes that balance between rewarding skill and being accessible.

I beat it around 2016/2017, very good, I remember joking to some Tinderella about trying to impress her with all the moons I collected.

What other Mario games have you played, and how would they compare?

Without waxing at length: Mario 64 (n64 and DS), Sunshine, the original NES and gameboy games, Super Mario World, A smidgen of the Paper Mario series (they didn't really catch my attention so never bothered completing them) and parts of the first Mario Galaxy, again not to completion. It's difficult to analyze exactly what was wrong with the Mario Galaxy games, but I suspect it had to do with the controls not being up to par for my tastes.

(Admittedly, the true fair comparison is Odyssey vs 64 vs Sunshine) Nintendo perfected the art of the dynamic difficulty curve without any actual dynamic difficulty. The difficulty is entirely driven by the player's desire for completion and challenge. They litter vastly more moons onto the levels than needed to progress, and the number is so high that 100% completion is an actual badge of honor and difficulty, but even just getting to the dark side of the moon is still an accomplishment. The difficulty curve has entirely to do with "I think I could get there..." and not arbitrary spikes midway through story progression.

Sunshine and Mario 64 both struggled not just with arbitrary and surprising difficulty spikes, but also slow gameplay and slow progression in comparison. That is to say nothing of the better precision of the pro and gamecube controller over either the n64 or the DS mario 64. The amazing thing about the mario games is in my more advanced age, I find myself unwilling to do collectathons and annoying puzzles- For example, dropping out of both breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom because they were tedious, but somehow, 3D Mario games have always managed to keep me playing longer.

No game isn't without its flaws, however: some things that are tedious about the moons are finding where some of them are, or the conditions for getting them to show. Luckily, obtuse moons can safely be ignored in favor of the more fun ones, and often while completing the others, the solution for a previous puzzle will reveal itself.

I never got past the third level of Mario Odyssey. It wasn't bad, I just couldn't see what made everyone I know rave about it so much. Does it open up or something? For the record my favourite is 64, probably due to my age.

To an extent. As you've probably already noticed the levels change as you clear the local boss of the level and once you "finish" the game they are populated with more moons and challenges and is completely open.

Aha, now that you say that I realise I should have guessed it would open up after the campaign. Alright, I'm giving it another shot.

Did you get to the part where you use the sentient hat to possess a T-Rex?* There's lots more stuff like that later on in the the game.

(*I'd say /r/brandnewsentence, but Mario Odyssey is old enough and popular enough that I'm certain others have independently invented that same sequence of words.)

64 is great (I also grew up with it), but imo Galaxy is the best. But I've always been a sucker for interesting physics in video games.

Same, galaxy is my second favourite, followed by 3d world, that game has a surprising amount of depth. The physics of sunshine were also heaps of fun to play with, although it is a way too frustrating game to start.

Man I love video games, long live Mario ♥️

Everything about it is fantastic. The only thing I would have wanted is a more expanded multiplayer functionality. The hide and seek game some modder hacked together seems fun and shows the potential of what could have been done.

Is anyone a part of EA/rationalist adjacent trading / crypto communities or group chats?

Would you be willing to invite me? I can trade a couple of invites.

Not sure if you meant ((EA or rat adjacent) and (trading or crypto)), in which case no; or (EA or rat adjacent or crypto or trading) in which case yes. Even if the former, there's occasional discussion of investing, but we're pretty heavily on the "all hail the efficient market hypothesis" side, so not fond of crypto.

Anyway, local discord server, DM if you'd like.

"Juror #2," Clint Eastwood's new film, is excellent. Watching it at home just made me doubly disappointed that it didn't get a wide theatrical release. (Not a single screening in my top-n-by-population USA city, where n is a small number.) I unreservedly recommend it being the next heavy* drama film you watch.

*Plot elements include plea bargains, homicide, alcoholism, a high-risk pregnancy, spelling "voir dire" correctly, etc...

Thank you for the recommendation, my girlfriend and I just watched it and we both really enjoyed it.

You're welcome.

Nicholas Hoult is in everything lately. He's one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood.

Never heard of it either, sounds interesting.

It's not often you see a movie that has an entirely novel concept, especially as a courtroom drama which is one of the most done-to-death formats.

Interesting that I've never even heard of it. Will look for it.

Managed to get a water cooling system installed for my new 9800x3d cpu, for which I wasn't impressed by the noise or temperatures when using a regular air cooler.

This owns. Much lower temps, much lower noise.

How do you have it aligned? Is it venting case air over the radiator and up out the case? That seems to be about as good as you can get.

With most gpus venting directly into the damn case now, I've been struggling to come up with a system that doesn't end up with hot air being used for cooling. At least drives have gotten so small it's easier to pull a ton of air in through the front.
My ideal would be a side-mounted external radiator with its own intake filter.

It's top mounted in a NZXT H9 Flow, and the top of the case has lots of small holes. I don't think I made any mistakes during installation. My build as a whole should be pretty optimal at this point. Unless I'm missing something.

To keep the case generally ventilated and somewhat cool, I've got Noctua PWM fans for intake from the bottom of the case, and one for exhaust out the back of the case. I've got curves set up to use multiple controllers for these, so they can react in two fashions to gpu heat and cpu heat.

I'm seeing reports that the Arctic LF III can produce issues when using the 3 cables for 3 headers connection, instead of using the all-in-1 cable. I wanted more control over the several parts of this thing. But the pump may not like that. That's the scuttlebutt.

Edit: I swapped the connections. I thought I had VRM on cpu_fan1. It was on 2. Radiator fans was on 1. Now, with vrm on cpu_fan1 and radiator fans on cpu_fan2, the noise is mostly gone, only appearing briefly during ramp-up! Yay! Hardware idiosyncracies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice, custom loop or AIO? If custom loop what are people using nowadays for water-blocks on their GPU, did EK survive their 'try just not paying their suppliers and employees' experiment?

What's your workload like, mostly gaming? I feel like the sweet spot for AIO cooling of CPUs is something like 30s to 10 minute saturation workloads. Shorter than that and you're not producing enough heat for your cooling system to matter. Longer than that you're saturating the liquid anyway. But for some GPU limited games and some workstation tasks even a "cheap" AIO has way better peak noise normalized performance than even pretty premium air coolers.

It's an AIO named Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360. :) It was supposed to be notoriously difficult to install, but it went fine as soon as I figured out I had the brackets upside down. The smoother, prettier side needed to be facing down to the mb, quite counter-intuitively.

I'm trying to figure out the best activity/cooling curves. I'm using Argus Monitor.

I've got the connector labeled PUMP plugged into the header aio_pump, and I plugged the connector labeled VRM into either cpu_fan1 or cpu_fan2, and the connector labeled FAN into cpu_fan2 or cpu_fan1.

In the program, there's one thing labeled cpufan running at 640 rpm while at 32% speed - I assume this is the vrm. Then there's auxfan0 reporting 1020 rpm while at 32%. And auxfan1 at 1240 rpm(?) while at a fixed 20% - guess this is the pump. I set it at a fixed 20% because it was making a repeating whining or wind blowing noise every second at higher speeds.

My biggest regret with my last build (besides choosing Intel and getting a sure-to-die 13900k which I'm loathe to RMA which would strand me without a desktop for 2+ weeks) was opting for air cooling. I've used Noctua fans for a decade now, they've always done well by me. The first (and last) time I tried an AiO water cooler was in 2013 and it was so terrible I wrote them all off entirely. Pump headers weren't standard on motherboards back then and I remember absolutely hating Corsair's software that was mandatory to keep running 24/7. (I'm not sure if I could've "just" pegged CPU_FAN1 to 100% in the BIOS and things would've worked; probably should've tested it.)

Anyway, despite having a case designed for maximum airflow and a huge Noctua fan, my 13900k will thermal throttle instantly if I run any benchmarks. Though it's fine in daily use and I haven't seen it exceed 80 while gaming, it is the principle of the matter... also the Noctua fan is so large I need to take the whole assembly off if I want to swap out RAM or m2s, which is rather annoying. Apparently AiOs have gotten better lately, so I'll give them another shot for my next build. Or just go whole hog with a custom loop, it doesn't look that hard.

Heh. I wouldn't touch Intel with a bargepole at this point, and I assume you will surely pick AMD next time. The whole "RMA/stranded with no desktop PC" issue is why I'm keeping my old system instead of selling it. Wouldn't get more than five or six hundred for it anyway. Always safer to have a backup option.

Custom loop sounds like fun. I might try that next time around. It seems like if you want a much quieter build overall under gaming load you need to liquid cool the GPU as well.

I wouldn't touch Intel with a bargepole at this point, and I assume you will surely pick AMD next time.

Can you elaborate? Last I checked (year ago maybe), intel still seemed to be the choice for power, with AMD really only preferable for budget / green builds. You make it sound like there’s no contest anymore - was I mistaken before / did something go wrong at intel / did AMD put out new cpus?

I don't have the full picture of what things were like around a year ago, except that for gaming purposes the AMD 7800x3d was definitely ahead of Intel back then. For productivity I don't know. Right now though, AMD is ahead of Intel for all purposes, including raw power/productivity, with better performing and less power hungry cpus. And they have some more cpus coming out in early 2025, which will probably widen the gap. With the current AMD 9800x3d, it's not even a contest for gaming. Something did go wrong at Intel. Their stock is down by around 60% since the start of 2024. They released worse products, and worse yet, there were serious errors in some of them, which SubstantialFrivolity and ThisIsSin have touched on. It looks like there won't be an easy way back up. There's been talk of Intel being bought out and split up etc. I wouldn't go near their stock or their products for the time being.

It's telling that the most popular Intel product is N100, an ultra-low voltage CPU that competes with Raspberry Pi and friends. It looked like Core 12xxx was going to be Intel's return to glory, but they dropped the ball and released two completely shit CPU generations.

Intel has had a problem with chips that damaged themselves because they weren't properly signaling power draw to the motherboard. They put out a microcode update to fix it, but the processors which were damaged can't be fixed. This has damaged Intel's reputation in the eyes of a lot of people who got burned by this bug.

Oof. That’s not Boeing level but it’s really bad.

Ah yes, this generation’s “Pentium bug.”

Well, there have been a few of them. There was one in 2011 where the SATA3 ports controlled on the northbridge would cook themselves (though that one was a problem with the chipset, not the processor); then there was Skylake's shit-ton of bugs in 2016 or so (to the point that Apple said 'fuck it' and accelerated their own CPU development). And then are the series of speculative execution attacks that made every older computer 30% slower when the patches were installed (and for some of them, there is no patch, they're just broken forever).

It seems Intel fucks up in a major way every 5 years or so at this point.

a repeating whining or wind blowing noise every second at higher speeds

Hopefully that goes away as the bubbles in the loop make it to the top.

With a 360, I wouldn't expect a load any normal user would reasonably run on a computer that's sitting in the same room as them to fully saturate the liquid in the loop. Maybe a supper long session of Cities: Skylines II, if you have literally Linus Torvalds needs for compiling Linux, or if your room needs an electric space heater so you run a synthetic benchmark/mine to keep warm at night.

I suspect there's something wrong with the fans.

The VRM fan seems to be the culprit for the annoying noise. The noise changes when I regulate its rpm in Argus. Setting it to bios controlled seems to reduce it the most. It's now noise free at idle. That's the most important thing.

The fans pointed at the radiator seem to be a little off-kilter. The graphic on them around the centerpoint moves.

The fans that were delivered with my case were also messed up. They made a much more high frequent irregular noise, due to bad bearings I think. I had to replace them.

Is there an unusual amount of shittiness in the fan production industry right now?

Edit: I swapped the connections. I thought I had VRM on cpu_fan1. It was on 2. Radiator fans was on 1. Now, with vrm on cpu_fan1 and radiator fans on cpu_fan2, the noise is mostly gone, only appearing briefly during ramp-up! Yay! Hardware idiosyncracies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Is there anywhere I can find the real world dates when certain events in Warhammer 40K happened? Like, what real world year was Roboute Guilliman brought back? I think it was around 2017 but I’m not exactly sure. How long ago did the Noctis Aeternis storyline start? The wiki isn’t very helpful, it only lists in-universe dates.

You mean the launch dates of a product/sku? I would look at edit dates of a popular wiki like lexarcanium?

After their dark ages and galactic collapse, I don't suppose they know the "actual" date.

But I mean the date that it was actually rolled out by Gameworks. Like what real life year did this story event start or happen?

Anyone play Creeper World?

I can barely explain my continued affection for these games. I just enjoy them. I think the series peaked with Creeper World 3, but they've all been good if you enjoy the fundamental premise. A bit repetitive from sequel to sequel, but it is what it is. He seems to alternate between doing top down economic grind the enemy down games, and side profile moving limited weapons platforms around games. Also I'm pretty sure they are just made by some southern dude alone.

Creeper World IXE came out, and I finished it in about 3 days. It was more like Creeper World 2 and Particle Fleet than it was Creeper World 1, 3 and 4. I enjoyed it enough.

I donno, any other players of this niche series?

I’ve played it!! I also like it hah. It’s very simple and I enjoy that.

I like them a lot, but I've found that there's two ways a map goes for me. Either I rush, and pause every few seconds to move stuff forward, and it's super stressful to play.

Or I take my time, but at some point the game becomes slow and tedious. I wish there was a better way to control your units. Like selecting and moving multiple units at once sucks because it doesn't take terrain into account, so you have to move every unit individually, and you have to move them forwards again and again. I really wish you could plan and then execute multiple commands where they move forward after the creep has been pushed back to a certain point, basically programming them to act a certain way. But I only played Creeper World 4. Maybe 3 is different.

Yeah, I think I played all of them except the latest (which I was completely unaware of until your post, so thanks). They're all very fun to play, though I do think the guy should hire a writer for the story.

What, you don't enjoy constant iterations of "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again"?

Tried several, but always bounced off. Not sure why exactly.

I've only played 3, 4, and particle fleet, but I enjoyed them quite a bit. I'd agree that 3 seems to be the best of the bunch, particularly with the community maps (the CSM variants are way too addictive).

Our family has been watching wildlife documentaries ("Our Planet" and "Predators" on Netflix and "Raptors" on Kanopy) the past few weeks and the improvement in quality of the footage has been exceptional, relative to only a decade ago. The improvement in rugged audio/visual equipment that can be used in the remote wilderness, such as drones, action cameras, and trail cameras has allowed for some seriously good footage to make its way onto the screen in the last few years. This is not even mentioning all the improved post-processing techniques like slow motion or filming at nighttime. Compare this to a studio TV production from 2014, it's probably hard to tell the difference between that an something that came out a year ago.

If anyone has any other recommendations, do share below. Bonus points if they're on either of those streaming platforms listed above.

The BBC Natural History Unit is the best at these. They’re all over the place when it comes to who’s streaming each one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Studios_Natural_History_Unit_filmography

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have to check it out. You're completely right in that they're all over different streaming platforms. Somewhat unrelated, but I ended up installing the PBS streaming app to my TV, a lot of the stuff requires a subscription but there's still a vast library to watch from. We just saw a nice nature documentary on Portugal and its island territories ("Portugal: Wild Land on the Edge"). Seems like it depends on your local PBS station, YMMV.

The hotly anticipated Civilization VII continues to unveil its leaders, and they’re raising a few eyebrows. Full list - https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Leaders_(Civ7)

There are some classic heavy hitters: Augustus, Charlamagne, Xerxes, Napoleon, Hatshepsut, Queen Isabelle of Spain.

Then there some fairly obscure figures that even most history buffs probably don’t recognize: Trung Trac, Pachacuti, Queen Amina.

Then there are some odd choices that seem to indicate the series is being a bit more abstract as to what constitutes a civilizational “leader,” like Confucious and Benjamin Franklin. They were never heads-of-state, but they were extremely influential figures on states and societies.

But some of the leaders are real stretches: Machiavelli? Ibn Batutta? And most controversially of all… Harriet Tubman? She did great stuff, but she was nowhere close to being a national leader or a major cultural force. If they wanted a black American, why not go with MLK? Or at least Frederick Douglas?

It’s hard not to see woke forces at play. Back in the CIV 4 days, the vast majority of leaders were men and disproportionately white or Asian, and the game was politically insensitive enough to let you play as Stalin. Since then, the leader options have become far more diverse, especially in Civ VI. For instance, if you were to try to think of French leaders who embody the nation, who would come to mind? Probably Napoleon, Charles De Gaulle, Louis XIV, maybe Henri IV, Napoleon III, or if you wanted to stretch what “France” is, you could say Vercingetorix or one of the Merovingians. Instead, Civ 6’s French leaders were… Catherine De Medici and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Who are some leaders that should be included in Civ VII that haven’t been in any previous games?

The hotly anticipated Civilization VII

I would say that I at least have no interest in it even despite the leaders. With the ages mechanic, and not keeping a single civ through the entire game, what they are making isn't Civ any more despite having the same name on the box. And on top of that, not only are they destroying the game (imo of course, YMMV), they're doing to to correct something I don't even agree was a problem that needed solving. So I don't really care who they pick, I'm not interested in a new game wearing the skin of Sid Meier's Civilization.

More on topic, I'm not terribly surprised that they are picking leaders based on DEI. It was a problem in Civ VI already (e.g. Catherine de Medici, Tomyris, Amanitore, etc) and it's unfortunately the case that game studios which start down the path of ideologically driven game decisions don't stop there. For more small scale politically correct game design, I also noticed that they have hopped on the "BCE/CE" bandwagon. It's a small thing, but it is pretty annoying to me as well.

I suspect that the whole "one leader, several civs" mechanic is inspired by DEI, even. Now you can girlboss your way through the millennia, and not just one but several patriarchal empires will bow under you.

I don't think it is, personally. It strikes me as an outgrowth of the (imo misguided) design philosophy of Civ VI where you picked a leader first, and a civ second. They really leaned hard into the leaders in Civ VI, and I think they decided from there that what people really cared about is the leader they pick, not the faction name they have. Thus the decision in VII to go with changing civs but a constant leader, when if anything it should've been the exact opposite.

Am I mis-remembering, or could you match any leader with any civ in, I think, Civ 2?

I know you could in Civ IV (not by default but you could enable it in the options). Not sure about 2, that was before I started playing.

The focus on leaders in 6 was a bit ironic given they made them all look like cartoony caricatures. The 2d and 3d art styles was my biggest annoyance about it.

They should bring back palaces. I loved building them. And have the leaders and throne rooms change during the eras and political systems.

Machiavelli

I guess he was a pretty strong proponent of a unified Italy back when there were many competing city-states?

..hotly anticipated.. by whom?

These games have gone to shit. Civ 5 was only so,so. They're not even trying. You should have a fricking globe. You should have good AI. None of that is present.

You should have good AI.

This is the most unbelievable choice by far to me. The ai genuinely plays like a 5-year old and needs to cheat its ass off to present even a mild challenge.

Civ 5 in multiplayer was a 9.5/10 experience for me. Single player is straight up tedium in comparison.

Do you have better strategy game recommendations?

Civ 5 with the (still being actively worked on) vox populi mod that adds more content, rebalances the game, and most importantly, makes the AI way better at both war and economy

Similar to Civ:

SMACx if you haven't played it, go play it. The graphics is a little rough but I think you can get used to it. The game itself is excellent, almost unsurpassed. Check if there aren't mods that fix AI, iirc there are some, the vanilla game has uneven AI that can be exploited. This mod is probably good.. Good writing & memorable leaders. Some quotes even made it into the real world iirc. Not the ones linked but I swear I saw certain phrases outside of the game context..

Endless Legend. It's kind of like Civ V/SmacX except it has quests and researching or even stealing a tech makes all further research more expensive. Units stack, are pretty customizable and battles are tactical but not that long. Factions are truly asymmetric, unlike in Civ with significant differences in playstyles due to different abilities. The only downside I know is that there's really no religion / cultural layer to the game. AI is good on normal difficulty, to lethal on higher difficulty settings due to cheating.

Less similar:

Age of Wonders 2 +(Shadow Magic DLC). Hard to describe it, it's like a mix between Heroes of Might & Magic and Civ. Supposedly a remake of the old Master of Magic games. Every player in the game controls a wizard, whose magic can affect the entire map. In addition to the classic 4x resources, there's mana. You don't have to control mana sources but it's massively beneficial, as it allows casting and maintaining enchantments of ..units, cities, or entire map regions. If you're a water-magic based swamp civ, you can turn your entire domain into a literal swamp, hindering everyone's movement but yours.. etc. In addition, there's 3 underground layers of the map and certain units can tunnel through soil (but not rock).

AoW 2 is notable for having a religious system that actually matters and it's not just a few % modifiers .. you have to take your God into consideration. IIRC you need to build a temple to do so, then it starts. So If you worship a War god, war & genocide gets you in his good graces. He will grant you war-related boons... it's not very deep but it wasn't all that deterministic and was a pretty nice touch. E.g. if a War God commands you to destroy a city, and you don't do so because your impious ass cares about diplomacy, well..

Master of Orion 2 -needs dosbox, only 640x480 is a classic 4x game. Pretty much like simpler Civ except tech are exclusive - in most research tiers you have to pick 1 of 3, so there are trade-offs to make and combat is godly because it's done using starships and these are designed using your known techs and then the fight itself is iirc initiative & turn based. Ship design is about twice as complex than Stellaris and the turn based combat is pretty fun. Even with it, it's nowhere near as time-intensive or tedious as Stellaris, even a huge map can be finished in ~12 hours.

Endless Space 2: the economic / research system is pretty similar to Endless Legend,but it's a space based game. The combat is a little disappointing bc you can't control it, only select tactic to be used. So it's like Stellaris. Very stylish game.. Also disappointing: the blurbs/concepts for various economy-related techs are seemingly very low effort and nonsensical on second look. Sseth has a video on it.

Sometimes it feels like Alpha Centauri was the last time they tried anything truly revolutionary with the formula. I should really play it again and refresh my memory. I remember it was the singular instance of being able to design my own units, do any sort of serious geo engineering, have floating cities, seriously need to worry about the local flora or fauna, etc. Many of those features haven't been seen again. I can't recall the last Sid Meier 4X game that let you create custom units. Even the spiritual successor, Beyond Earth, didn't.

Unit design is in Endless Legend. It doesn't have geo-engineering though...

..neither floating cities, though a DLC brings in ocean control & resources.

Unfortunately, the AI in Alpha Centauri is still kind of bad. It will forward-settle 5 tiles away from your cities like a complete imbecile and all the AIs band up together if the player ever gets strong.
Plus, you don't really get to choose between econ/tech/military. If you do, the ginger bitch will declare war and invade you with 50 units as soon as mathematically possible.

My favourite part of the expansion was how war crimes against the aliens suffered no diplomatic penalties.

So you could play as a respected democratic society that upheld human rights, and still load up your units with chemical weapons and gas alien cities.

Speaking of Civilization: has anyone played The Old World? How's it?

I dipped out of the genre around the end of Civ 5 but it looks attractive as a Civ clone with some CK2 elements.

I enjoyed what I played but I never got deep into it. I kinda like the late game stuff in Civ, so something that focuses just on the ancient era didn't hold my interest super well.

It's forgettable, I've put maybe 50 hours into it. The game loops are pretty simple. Definitely not better than Civ/CK/Victoria et al.

Shit.

Court opinion:

  • During a telephone call, a prisoner's romantic partner asks him whether he is gay. The prisoner becomes angry and ends the call. On the next day, he writes a two-page email explaining that he is not gay, he hates homosexual people, and if he had been at home he would have shot her for insulting him so badly.
  • The prison reads the email, blocks it from being sent, charges the prisoner with the offense of threatening another person with bodily harm, convicts him of that offense, and imposes punishment of 90 days of solitary confinement, 60 days of lost good-behavior credit, and 15 days of lost recreational privileges.
  • The appeals panel reverses. The prisoner's objective in writing this email obviously was to convince his romantic partner that he was not homosexual, not to threaten her or anybody else with bodily harm. Therefore, the conviction was arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.

He didn’t even say “…in Minecraft.”

There is a well known case where a man told another man that he would have killed him had the judges not been in town. He was tried for threatening him and was found not guilty because the judges were in town. This was back when judges circulated between towns to try cases. Based on that case, shouldn't he have been found not guilty?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberville_v_Savage

Doesn't exactly look like "fun thread" material but...

The rules for inmates are very different (and stricter) than rules for people on the outside.

"I'd shoot you for saying that to my face" is something extremely unlikely to result in prosecution under normal circumstances.

But inmates (and parolees) can definitely be charged/revoked for stuff like that. They get no slack, and (imo) rightly so. If you're already in lockup, sending your girlfriend an email threatening violence (even if you were being hyperbolic) is something you should know better than to do, and if you don't, you probably should stay in lockup.

Doesn't exactly look like "fun thread" material

You are supposed to laugh at (1) the prisoner's writing two pages of "no homo" and (2) the appeals panel's being forced to defend the prisoner's right to send "repeated[] express[ions] of hatred of individuals belonging to the LGBTQ+ community" that it finds "vulgar, reprehensible, and distressing".

"I would've shot you for that" is definitely not a threat, but I guess I'm ok locking that sort of person up regardless if it was serious.

How is that not a threat? It's just "If you do that when I'm able to kill you, I will" but in subjunctive rather than future tense. Either way, after the criminal's release the victim has to choose between avoiding the threatened speech or getting killed.

The appeals panel's full rationale:

At the outset, we reject the notion that Chase's J-pay email constituted a threat to LGBTQ+ inmates, others, or his girlfriend, none of whom received the email. We recognize the DOC's concern and interest in preventing inmates from threatening each other or making threats against others. However, Chase's email, though vulgar, reprehensible, and distressing, does not constitute a clear and unambiguous threat based upon the objective analysis required under Jacobs v. Stephens.

In Jacobs, our [state] Supreme Court addressed whether a comment made by an inmate to a corrections officer constituted a threat. The corrections officer had asked the inmate, Jacobs, for his identification card and he responded, "Fuck you, I ain't giving you shit. If you want my ID, step in the back room." Another witness reported that, as the officer turned to walk away, Jacobs stated, "Come on, come on, I'll fuck you up." On appeal, Jacobs argued that there was insufficient evidence to support the conclusion that he threatened the officer with bodily harm. He asserted that, while he used abusive language, he did not intend to threaten the officer.

Our Supreme Court held: "The determination of whether a remark constitutes a threat is made on the basis of an objective analysis of whether the remark conveys a basis for fear." And a reasonable mind could conclude that Jacobs had threatened the officer. The Court noted, however, that other witnesses heard him make additional threatening comments. It stated: "When words of an inmate are of such a nature as would reasonably convey the menace or fear of death to the ordinary hearer, then that is a threat of bodily harm and therefore punishable under [the prison regulations]."

Here, Chase's email was directed to his girlfriend and allegedly offered to explain that he is not gay and how offended he was by her question. Unlike Jacobs, there were no witnesses to Chase's words, although they are memorialized in the email. His specific comments and disdain for the LGBTQ+ community, however, were not directed at any particular person, and there is nothing in the record to support a finding that Chase intended to harm any of his fellow inmates who may be gay, or his girlfriend. We are not persuaded that Chase's unsent email reasonably conveyed any menace or put any individual in fear of death to constitute a true threat of bodily harm.

Amazing. Perfect Friday Fodder.

Methinks bro doth protest too much.

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