You can’t expect a Lizard Attack Helicopter to know how to write literature from the perspective of the shitheads who are always trying to break into their home and kill them for some shiny metal or leftovers in the fridge.
Humans on the other hand have no excuse for not completely understanding what it is like to be a dragon, in reality we are pretty much exactly the dragons of the real world….
…which is also exactly why dragons aren’t that interested in getting to know us well enough to write us realistically, they already know the same exact story in their own language and their language has way more fun stuff like fireballs and singed sheep and mmmmm a whole pasture of cows and WHOOOOOSSHHH.
…then again there all these stories about innocent princesses being abducted by cruel dragons right before the idyllic wedding happens and I can’t help but think about all the times historians dismiss close relationships between two men or two women in history as definitely just a really great bro-sesh friendship no queerness nope, no giant billboards saying THEY WERE PROBABLY GAY AND BEAUTIFUL.
So maybe dragons are just pulling a solid for women and periodically “brutally abduct them” (bust them out of their suffocating shit wedding on a flying motorcycle except they are the motorcycle (think Hagrid and motorcycle - Hagrid) AND they can spit fire out of both their front and back) and then when the man comes to rescue the princess the dragon gets a free meal and the woman gets to relax the whole time at the Dragon’s place and vent about how awful overbearing toxic hetero men are who seem to get to run everything in society.
If this is the case we have much to be worried about because it means Dragons are not only terrifyingly smart and powerful, they are also woke as fuck.
AUSTIN, TX—In the latest round of layoffs for the company’s struggling automotive division, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla fired the entire team behind brakes, sources confirmed Wednesday. “As we continue to rightsize the Tesla workforce, we have come to the decision that stopping the car is no longer a critical...
I think there was a period in the 2010s where they had it harder because reality was getting so absurd, but in 2024 I think the Onion has firmly crossed that valley of humorous uncertainty and confidently begun vertically scaling the mountains of “Let’s Just Take Awful Real News And Make It A Little More Plausible As A *Joke While Giving Everybody A Hug While They Are Crying From The Brutality Of Late Stage Capitalism” like a possessed, gargantuan spider of bitter sarcasm.
No seriously, Steam Decks run on an immutable Arch (edit: I thought my steam deck was a Ubuntu distribution until just now when someone corrected me, see how much of a fool I am and yet I still find my steam deck easy to use when I am exhausted and don’t want to troubleshoot/learn new shit!) distro of Linux. Immutable means every update addresses the core of the operating system in a way that you can’t fuck up anywhere as easily as a normal operating system.
The desktop UI is great, there is a flatpak App Store pre-installed, I mean you can search for Xonotic or any other utility you need and install it in 30 seconds flat. It is just a Linux desktop with decent presets.
The thing is the Steam Deck doesn’t boot to desktop, it boots to a big picture mode where the UI looks like a console. It is easy to browse your games and it feels like you are using a very focused, locked down device from the likes of Apple or Nintendo, not a full blown portable Ubuntu computer running a slick wrapper around one of the most extensible constructions of software ever made (no unfortunately the Steam Deck isn’t a LISP machine).
The clever bit though is that SteamOS (basically a Ubuntu distro) has Proton which is designed to emulate windows (closely related to the other windows emulator WINE). This allows you to play the vast majority of windows games on your Steam Deck and because the windows games are ran in a virtual environment…. when you press the power button to sleep your Steam Deck it just pauses that virtual environment which means that ALLL kinds of games old and new that were never designed to be abruptly paused and resumed end up with wayyyyyyy less issues on the Steam Deck than they would if you were running them in Windows natively and trying to do the same thing (with say a microsoft Surface or something).
I regularly play Steel Panthers WinspWW2 on my Steam Deck. I run it on dosbox which either comes preinstalled on the Steam Deck or is available on the “app store” I can’t remember (not really a store because no one is selling anything).
^look how shit this website looks, this is an ANCIENT game running on DOS and it honestly barely runs on native windows anyways, you can’t full screen it without it crashing on windows.
All I had to do was add the launch file to steam and now I can open up my steam deck, scroll down to WinspWW2 and start playing the best turn based tactical strategy game ever made… on the go…… that came out in 1995 and has been updated continually since and is basically being kept functioning by an elaborate janky lifesupport system that most people with windows computers don’t even want to bother with because the experience of playing the game is too annoying….
It just runs on my Steam Deck tho!
The virtual dos environment lets me not have to worry if the game will crash when I pause and alt tab to a different program or abruptly put my device to sleep without giving the game time to save or something…. the Steam Deck just suspends the virtual environment and from the perspective of WinspWW2 no change needs to happen. The program just sits open and frozen waiting for me to press the power button on my Steam Deck and keep playing.
Not saying you have to do nerdy shit with your steam deck, what I am saying is that you can do whatever you want to with your steam deck and not have to worry that a company like Microsoft is going to take a dump on a nice thing you had worked out between you and your gaming setup.
Get the Steam Deck it is the best of both worlds, slick and polished when you want it to be, customizable and extensible when you need it to be.
I understand, you can use the steamdeck docked liked a normal desktop of course.
You just have a fairly hardware limited extremely lightweight gaming desktop that you can throw in your backpack, but it still does a damn fine job of that too so shrugs. I mean get a Logitech k780 or whatever Bluetooth keyboard you like, a mouse too, Bluetooth works just as fine on the Steam Deck as any other laptop.
I like plenty of indie games and I have a deep love for entire genres of video games that categorically don’t require any computing muscle to work (cataclysm dark days ahead I love you) so I don’t care as much about having a super powerful gaming computer at this point in my life but it is definitely a valid criticism of the deck.
I do love that this is basically like being a devout worshipper of a cult but realizing 5 years in that I got the wrong address, showed up to the wrong cult, but then everyone was so dark and moody and only spoke in deceiving rhymes so that nobody realized the administrative mistake, including me AND the innocent villagers going about their day outside the cult complex who I continually tried to convert to worship a god which was quite obviously in fact not the god lovingly illustrated on the sign atop the cult mansion’s roof either in name or description but in point of fact the god worshipped by the other cult mansion two blocks south on Michael Street not Michel Street (? Is that even a name?).
An understandable mistake for a citizen passing by from the other side of the city, but when you are actually in the wrong cult and don’t even know it? Oof that is some next level shit.
you’re testimonial here isn’t very convincing. It’s a portable gaming device that requires a dock (or hub) to even play on a monitor. It’s underpowered by design. Not even all top Steam games run on it.
Damn sorry I can see why you don’t like it and those are valid points about doing a bad job with my testimonial, I don’t really know that much about any of this I just type things into google and yell excitedly at the words that pop up most of the time when I am programming (I am looking to learn how to automate this with AI).
Also ok my confusion in thinking WINE is a virtual environment and an emulator when it isn’t, is something anyone could get confused about, if they wanted to make sure everyone knew they should have Put It In The Name and instead they named it after that sour grape drink I would always see my parents friends drink who think the New York Times is a genuinely progressive news organization.
But whatever, I am a fool as I keep telling people and if anything my post should be more convincing because I love my steam deck and find it easy to use even when I am downloading and installing utilities in desktop mode like Qutebrowser and tailoring custom keybindings to use it. I can still figure this out, which is a miracle if a very mundane one at that.
You are clearly right here, and if I was going to make a good argument for the Steam Deck I should have come off as someone who evidently loves their Steam Deck and wants to chat with people about it in a critical fashion where commenters with various different perspectives acknowledge the ups and downs of the device and it’s inherent limitations while refraining from the need to correct newbies sharing their love for the device on incorrect technical details that other newbies aren’t going to care about.
Also, Biden is walking a tightrope. Most Jewish people vote for Democrats. If he loses some pro-Gaza voters, he’ll win some pro-Israel voters. And the other way around.
You are knowingly or not trying to manufacture consent for a reality that does not exist,
Western media and politicians want to keep pretending like the genocide going on that we are complicit in hasn’t resulted in the deaths of at least 30,000 innocent Palestinians, and that death count is old I wouldn’t be surprised if it was ~80,000 at this point with famine conditions being present for this long.
Most of the rest of the world including voters in the US DO NOT agree with Biden directly enabling genocide, it simply isn’t supported by the facts though you can hear it on any US news station Republican leaning or Democrat leaning.
At the end of the day, there are no winners in this conflict.
You are so very tragically wrong, the reason this conflict is still happening is because there are very important winners. Netanyahu knows that the minute the existential threat of Hamas goes away and he stops handing territory to his rightwing settler supporters (Israel’s flavor of MAGA idiots but even worse) he is going to lose legitimacy as a non-democratic leader (seriously this guy isn’t some supporter of democracy people) so maintaining this conflict is LITERALLY existential for Netanyahu. This is common knowledge globally across most political spectrums at this point.
And yeah, the settlers win, the rightwing hateful bigots who are erasing Palestinians from their homes and from this earth at a terrifying rate, win. Russia wins from this conflict drawing attention away and giving no moral grounds to establish effective international pressure to reel them in.
Somewhat maddeningly the US directly loses as we have now permanently lost legitimacy in the eyes of any countries that aren’t direct allies who will automatically tow whatever narrative line they are told to. Israel loses too because they made themselves a pariah state in the world’s eyes. The Palestinians lose, perhaps most of their culture and community, certainly the lives of their loved ones and kids.
There are winners though and it is incredibly disingenuous to pretend there isn’t.
It is also just a completely baseless narrative that Biden has to keep supporting this genocide by providing unlimited weapons and diplomatic cover because it is what US citizens want.
It isn’t and Biden’s refusal to budge on this issue even when his staffers are basically panicking about it destroying his otherwise sound presidential re-election campaign (those that haven’t resigned because of it) could very well cost him the election. If Biden loses it will UNDOUBTEDLY be because he refused to evolve on this issue even when voters from his party literally staged protests and voted undecided to beg him to change his policy on this mass project of cruelty while being extremely careful not to feed energy to Trump or a third party candidate.
Genocide is a redline.
Period.
Those are US made bombs being delivered by US made guidance systems by IDF crews that train regularly with US fighter pilots and Close Air Support military assets.
Don’t come at me with “oh but it is complicated and we can’t do anything about it”. If Biden truly wanted to stop this he could pick up the phone and do it in probably 10 seconds flat (and everybody in his staff knows it).
Israel cannot politically function without US support especially now that Israel has made its self into a pariah state, yet we firehouse incredible amounts of arms to Israel and simultaneously give them free reign to do whatever the hell they want to while flicking us off like the most murderous version possible of a rebellious teen and dysfunctional parent that sort of likes the violence.
Netanyahu ultimately has very little power to dictate the terms of the power relationship given this reality. Biden is utterly complicit.
To bad they also have no idea how they foreclosed our future, though the window for them to not have to confront the awful cynicism of their choices has justttt about closed (you can actually see the gates now off in the distance, they are the 33 named storms expected by quite shellshocked meterologists and storm forecasters to pummel the Carribean and North America this summer in what is projected to be one of the worst hurricane seasons on record by about as far as the distance is between the sea temperatures off the coast of Africa where hurricanes are born are being ALREADY AT THE TEMPERATURES THEY NORMALLY ONLY REACH IN LATE JUNE OR JULY and whatever the shitty record used to be)
So you’re saying we need to cover Wyoming in cement. Gotcha.
I am sure if you sold it to Wyoming voters as a way to hurt trans people AND immigrants at the same time they would happily vote for it and drown themselves alive in a sea of concrete.
Such a simple but beautiful act of love to spend your last moments of life doing that knowing that if those photos might help people understand volcanoes and their associated hazards even a tiny better in the future it was worth it.
You could call it tragic, and of course it is, but I prefer to call it badass.
yo geolooggggyyyyyyy (lots of good brain food I promise)___ There is a wonderful diverse world of volcanic eruptions! One thing you might not have thought about is how glaciers often form at the top of large cone volcanoes and the way the lava erupting interacts with a large volume of ice can shape the eruption significantly. One of the biggest results are lahars, like muddy, liquidy avalanches but even faster and deadlier. usgs.gov/…/d-claw-computer-simulation-landslide-b…usgs.gov/…/lahars-move-rapidly-down-valleys-river…To give you a good point of reference though, one thing that links all volcanic eruptions and is a good axis for comparison between different eruptions and volcanoes is that all magma pretty much comes up from the interior of the earth to the near surface starting at the same chemical composition (called “mafic” it sounds like “basic”). Mafic minerals are heavy, dense and tend to be dark colored when viewed in a hand specimen, a common mafic rock is Basalt. Most of the oceanic crust is basalt. https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/593a6765-e3c6-4280-91e5-6971db9e8eeb.webpAvailable Wherever You Get Your Bottoms Of OceansFelsic minerals tend to be light both in mass and in coloring, a comon felsic rock is Granite. https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/1fbf7496-2513-4916-a2b3-999567602144.webpLooks like your mom’s countertop, I remember it well how perfectly the skin of her naked legs complemented the gorgeously polished crystal textures of quartz, potassium feldspar (K-feldspar), sodic plagioclase feldspar, hornblende amphibole, and micaThis is a graph of Viscosity, the more Viscous the Magma the less ability it has to flow like a liquid (and thus the more likely a plug is likely to form inside a volcano). It is also more difficult for lower temperature magma to flow, and Felsic lava is almost always lower temperature (cooling had to occur to become Felsic in the first place so). https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/f76404f8-1cc8-46f7-80e4-cd1168a09a64.webpen.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagmaHere is something to ground these two ends of what probably seems like an arbitrary spectrum to focus on, the Oceanic Crust (i.e. the bottom of the ocean) on this planet is overwhelmingly made up of mafic rocks (i.e. Basalt) and large amounts of felsic rocks only really form on continental plates where there is the space and depth of rock to house massive chambers of magma, especially since Oceanic Plates are always getting subducted and recycled unlike Continental Plates (and thus the magma might be subducted & recycled before it could even begin the process of becoming significantly felsic). This axis of chemistry is critical to Geologists because it points directly to some of the biggest trends of geology on the planet and a related fact I might as well drop here is that because of these dynamics Continental Plates (i.e. basically the continents) can be orders of magnitude older (on the order of 1 billion years or older, the earth is only 4 or so billion years old) than oceanic crust which tends to be younger than 200 million years old (and often is much younger). On Continental Plates if magma feeds into large underground chambers (batholiths) and is allowed to cool slowly then certain minerals will begin to form and precipitate out like snow that layers up on the bottom of the chamber. The specifics of what minerals these are depends on how long, how hot, how much pressure and other factors but you can vaguely think of it as a process of distillation where magma progresses from the original “mafic” composition to a “felsic” one as the high temperature mafic minerals crystallize out leaving behind the felsic magma mixture. The felsic minerals don’t crystallize out until the magma has significantly cooled and thus if the magma undergoing this process in a chamber is integrated into an eruption, it can become extremely explosive and destructive. https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/65721ae8-6550-4b8c-979b-640acba4a239.webpopentextbc.ca/…/4-2-magma-composition-and-eruptio…https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/b01940fc-eaf4-4f2f-9380-2ebeb718a7b1.webpHalf Dome in Yosemite California is such a trip because it is so clearly what we imagine in geology when we talk about a really big underground chamber of magma (after it has cooled into rock obv), Half Dome just looks like exactly how you would imagine it if you dug up an old magma chamber and cracked in half with a suitably large hammer-----------------
Surely theres been some research into like pressure relief holes or something…antacid tabs?
I am sure there are lots of geologists who have thought of it, it makes sense right?
The problem is that nobody gives a shit about listening to geologists unless they are talking about where to find oil. Even if a geoengineering project of this scale and magnitude (with such catastrophic consequences if it goes wrong) where possible with near current geological science and hardware this degree of interest and investment of society is only ever committed to visions techbros provide and I don’t think a single techbro has ever taken a geology class and actually remotely paid attention.
It was geologists in the 1970s who first pointed out the obvious connection between human released CO2 emissions and global warming.
Nobody gave a shit :)
(plenty of complicit geologists who made a veryyyyy good living too don’t get me wrong)
We are just weirdos going on about rocks except when those rocks are really valuable and provide the capacity to create empires but even in those cases we are never really part of that, we are always still the weirdos going on about rocks who everybody is like “ok but can you shut up now and point to the gold on the map?”.
I know it is a weird example but look at the landscapes of virtual environments, video game developers have been trying to craft evocative landscapes since the beginning of video games even before 3D engines, you would think that some of them might have been interested to find inspiration for world design from the dizzying variety of landforms and stories described in geology (that are perfect to engage a player with because geological landscapes are layered stories first and foremost).
From the perspective of a geologist, it is obvious for game developers to make world building tools that allow molding an entire mountain range for an open world rpg by first starting with two continents and smashing them together with your mouse over and over again until it made a compelling starting point (instead of just making every damn mountain by hand or just writing a dumb algorithm to randomly generate mountains) and then running a massive river through the mountains for 10 million years to create the main valley for the game.
Todd Howard released a screenshot of the next Elder Scrolls Game
the story here was there was a river and then a mountain range came in (some new kid named Appalachians) and was like “sorry dude” but then the Delaware River was like “I am literally going nowhere bro, put your silly mountains wherever you want and I will cut you down when you get in my way”. This friendly conversation has been going on for 400-500 million years, which is about 1/8 of the earth’s history (the earth was a hot mess for the 1st billion so that barely counts). A lot of rivers are pretty lazy, but not the Delaware River, you gotta give it credit.
A geological sandbox for large scale world design that allowed game developers to quickly and intuitively create landscapes with layered pasts and local variety that perennially inspired curiosity from players seems so obvious to me it is painful. (Also as a fun toy for its own sake).
Like damn… video games barely know how to make a rock outcrop look natural and it is 2024… ——
All that being said to point out that your vision of a cool geo-engineering project is mostly unrealistic because of humans not even bringing geology into the picture. Part of the globalized contagion of late-stage capitalism is VERY crucially a collective forgetting of the stories in the landscapes around us. We have been taught to see the landscape around us as a background for our genius, not the primary gift passed down by our ancestors, the foundation of all the beauty in our lives and a fascinating machine of anarchy that creates endless forms of order.
Everywhere all over the world people are extracting groundwater at a ridiculously unsustainable rate (the fucking AXIS EARTH IS TILTED ON has changed because so much groundwater has been extracted) even while geologists try to point out there is going to be no clean water left???, the dysfunction of our thinking with respect to land goes very deep unfortunately.
Instead we are left with this trash Elon Musk-esque obsession with spiritually disconnecting ourselves from Earth and leaving for Mars as if the idea of separating us from the landscape (and natural systems/biosphere) we evolved in makes any sense at a basic level of our body maintaining homeostasis effectively or is something we would even desire to do (thanks for that one, sci-fi shows and books!). It is like plucking an ant from an ant colony, carefully placing it into the ocean and whispering “now you can start a new life here”…… It makes no sense.
Aain I love how it looks like a drunk geologist made a big scribble on a map and said before passing out “that Campi Flegrei, that’s a BIG one right there!” and you are just left looking at the map being like… what… are you sure that just looks like you randomly circled a huge part of the landscape?..like… really the whole bay?
Are we just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists sitting in dark rooms with a computer and pinboard against the wall, complete with strings between posted mugshots of lava domes and dikes, muttering to ourselves as we circle vaguely roundish things on a map in red ink and exclaim “ANOTHER!!!” ??
No, we are usually in the middle of nowhere in the woods hiking erratically across the landscape with nobody around so we tend to shout at things more than mutter because why not.
Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.
Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?
sigh and I am really trying not to come off like I am claiming everything has to be realistic to the stupid little details only a geologist would know.
…but also if natural landscapes ARE unintuitive to most people now, doesn’t that feel like an existential crisis to you? Shouldn’t game developers seek us to reconnect our intuition with natural landscapes to try to heal that awful severance of our soul?
My point was that building landscapes to tell stories in without building the landscape as a story too is a silly thing to do, both for immersion of the player and for overall work.
There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.
My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.
It is obvious, and you still aren’t seeing it. You keep misidentifying the main thing I point out as the beginning of the creative process and a catalyst to seeding inspiration for level and world design as an arbitrary complicated ask that has nothing to do with the experience of level designers engaging in the creative process nor how organic and engaging a landscape feels in the end product.
It’s like, an axiom to this conversation is that the knowledge I have of geology must mean MORE work for game designers and that gives you a right to portray me as having a snarky, unappreciative attitude towards the incredible amount of work that goes into video game development.
It honestly portrays that lack of interest in geology well, you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development because it involves learning about something other than computers and computers are already hard enough.
I didn’t make the computers too hard to fit anything else in your brain, I also constantly give mad props to my favorite video game designers especially indie ones and ESPECIALLY open source projects with loving communities or developers who have maintained wonderful games for years and years.
…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this
Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.
Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?
I don’t understand why you see a difference there.
These processes also don’t have to be extremely advanced geophysical simulations, you can abstract shit into elegant systems that reflect deep complexity, it is called good game design.
The idea of not having a internal monologue is kinda strange to me. I have a constant internal monologue. Like there doesn’t go a moment by without me talking to myself in my head.
You should try taking Finnegans Wake, especially before going to bed, and see what happens. It rewires your internal monologue syntax in some really strange way that is not far from the experience of sleep.
Saving people is illegal (lemmy.ml)
Careful when writing your dragons (www.smbc-comics.com)
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/dragons
Tesla Lays Off Entire Team Behind Brakes (www.theonion.com)
AUSTIN, TX—In the latest round of layoffs for the company’s struggling automotive division, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla fired the entire team behind brakes, sources confirmed Wednesday. “As we continue to rightsize the Tesla workforce, we have come to the decision that stopping the car is no longer a critical...
Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our unshittified experience (sh.itjust.works)
Source...
Exclusive: Bernie Sanders worries young people are underestimating the threat from Trump (www.usatoday.com)
Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died (www.seattletimes.com)
checkmate, big geology!! (mander.xyz)
We're all a little crazy (mander.xyz)