A Nuclear Machine That Heats Space

[nicdevera]

this is the third video i've seen on how the new nasdaq rules will force index funds to buy spacex stock. odd how the fix can be so openly dirty but apparently nothing can be done? the sec's supposed to stop this but they're trump's bitch. and so people think the ai companies will use the same ipo trick, months or years from now, to bilk more out of pension funds etc

maybe index funds should redefine or set their own criteria so they're not at the mercy of the nasdaq

[nuclearspaceheater]

I was looking into how this would affect my own holdings of VOO, which is indexed to the S&P 500, and just as I was researching this today, the S&P announced their decision not to adopt the proposed fast-track rules.

Even if they had, they would still have been the slowest index to add them, since their version of the proposal only reduced the seasoning time from 12 months to 6 months. Yet, 6 months would have put it on the edge of a lot of SpaceX's IPO lock-ups, which the unchanged 12 month time avoids.

[roboco-san]

the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth

[sols-el-poble-salva-al-poble]

This is not only confined to the realm of audiovisual enterprises either.

I really love the concept of lucrum cessans (roughly translated as lost profits), which pretty much means in our current times that a corporation does an annual profit prediction, and if God Forbid a rogue state would change any legislative regulation translating into profit shortfall, said corporation may be entitled to sue that state for damages.

There is this thing called Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS for short, created in the 1960s to saveguard the profit of colonial enterprises from the newly created states. Roughly, this is a publicly-funded private court wherein corporations can and indeed do sue states for the aforementioned lucrum cessans (see this case of a French corporation suing the Egyptian state for raising the minimum wage). As if this wasn’t enough, it works one-way. That is only corporations may initiate court proceedings, making this ISDS something of a wet dream for “libertarians”.

The above is not a scathing remark regarding the entitlement of some media conglomerates, it is the paradigm of the all-reaching post-colonial neoliberal capitalist hellscape we are engulfed by.

[shieldfoss]

How the fuck is a state-backed court system that only works through the force of arms of larger states bullying smaller states a libertarian wet dream

[nuclearspaceheater]

Completely unrelated to the subject at hand but I bookmarked this post in my toolbar when it was published as something to respond to later and I've just used the date of the above reblog (2020-07-15) as a known reference for dating how long the bookmarks around it have been in my toolbar like it's the iridium anomaly between geological strata.

[nuclearspaceheater]

My job on the solarpunk commune will be making artisanal polyethylene.

[kn0wmore]

[nuclearspaceheater]

USDA Confirms Presence of New World Screwworm in the United States

Sure, why not.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Doing every physical therapy exercise for 2 years so that all my stabilizer muscles are absolutely jacked while neglecting the major muscle groups and presenting a sports medicine specialist with the most baffling physique they've ever seen.

[gcu-sovereign]

At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people

This helped me recategorize Netflix as a TRAP, should it become your dominant leisure mode.  Sufficiently large, designed with bingeing in mind, and, I think, lacking in checks on boredom.

Like, unless you are exercising agency all the time to check whether something is entertaining, you could sink hours into a show that’s trash. /stares in recalled horror at certain anime/

[nuclearspaceheater]

Anyone who pursues pleasure as an end unto itself must be mindful of the distinction between "fun" and "engaging". Possibly video gamers more than most, in my experience, but it's easy to fall into the trap in other ways.

And I mean this even purely within the scope of pursuing pleasure, not because it'll waste time you could have been spending being productive. Rather, because it'll waste time you could otherwise have spent having fun.

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[ms-demeanor]

Me (with many food allergies): Here is a recipe that includes three ingredients. Each ingredient is actually one single ingredient, not a pre-made food that includes multiple ingredients.

People in the comments all the time: Okay but why didn't you use [x ingredient that is actually multiple ingredients and frequently includes your allergens] instead?

[ms-demeanor]

My absolute least favorite thing in the entire cooking world is when i see a recipe for "G-free 3-ingredient casserole" or "G-free 3-ingredient donuts" and the first ingredient is "a can of gluten free soup" or "gluten-free pastry dough."

No! Wrong! That is not three ingredients!

When I say three ingredients I mean it! Lentils, Salt, Water! Egg, Cocoa Powder, Sugar! Whipping Cream, Cocoa Powder, Sugar! Broccoli, Oil, Garlic!

[nuclearspaceheater]

A list of 3 "ingredients" that includes both "sugar" and "egg" is already crossing so many levels of abstraction that it shouldn't be hard to see how people would be confused about what you're looking for.

Just look at the difficulties of rigorously defining what "processed food" even means. This is unavoidably a vibes based distinction without just fully enumerating what you consider an "ingredient".

[mereologic]

it's always okay to use they/them pronouns for someone, even if they say it isnt. this is because they/them pronouns are not gendered, so you aren't misgendering them.

[mereologic]

"what about respecting people's preferences" if someone told you that they never wanted to be referred to as "someone" and always wanted to be referred to by their name when being spoken about, we'd rightfully recognize this request as absurd. it's not any different when they insist on being gendered. they are looking for reasons to be angry at other people and have learned that making unreasonable requests is a way to do this. just ignore them.

[prokopetz]

Some games on Steam use the "Female Protagonist" tag the same way live-action Disney films get promoted for gay representation. I once bumped into a game that was tagged "Female Protagonist" because there's an interactive cutscene where a female NPC is briefly controllable. You walk across a room.

[prokopetz]

The tag search doesn't look too bad if you go with "sort by relevance" because that tends to make the ones with actual female protagonists float to the top, but under literally any other sorting it's like:

First-person open world RPG that lets you pick "she/her" at chargen (note: you are never referred to in the third person)

Game where the all-but-faceless player/viewpoint character is explicitly male, but the plot centres on the woman he's dating

Party-based game where the male lead does all the talking, but you can change your on-screen marching order to put a girl up front

Plotless puzzle game where there's a picture of a woman next to the game board

Street Fighter 6, for some reason

[nuclearspaceheater]

I think that second one is correct, actually: protagonist, view point character, and player character do not need to be the same. I mean, if it were reversed and you were a female player character in a plot that centers on the male she's dating, you wouldn't call that "female protagonist", would you? I suppose it depends on the particulars, but going by your description alone the logic does apply here. This seems like exactly the sort of meta-textural distinction OP would be a fan of.

I think there's a solid case that the protagonist of TES: Oblivion isn't the player character, but Martin Septim, for a mainstream example of the difference.

[slitherpunk]

but do you play shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less 🤨

[slitherpunk]

the thing about "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding" is that these games exist and are out there and you have to make the conscious choice to seek them out instead of just expecting the big companies to deliver this, because they will not

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

I think “gamers” don’t deserve Early Access, tbh

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Is early access an excuse to release an unfinished product sometimes? Yea, for sure

But like. Functionally it serves as a way for live experience testing to be done on a game. It’s a way to dial it in on what people want, and on how to best make the game.

This means that, stars above, you don’t need to fucking review bomb it the second there’s a problem, you have avenues for giving feedback, stop saying the game is doomed because there’s been one bad update ffs

This brought to you by the embarassing state of people talking about both Slay the Spire 2 and Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core

[im-a-luxury--few-can-afford]

the average person's opinion can now reach media Creators with unprecedented ease and holy fuck does the average person have terrible game dev opinions

[fleshengine]

hang on where's the

[nuclearspaceheater]

The problem I have with that is, if that's the attitude we're taking here, shouldn't they be letting people play for free? I remember when that was the norm; "closed betas" and "open betas", they'd call them. I was in the pre-launch open beta of World of Warcraft in 2004, for example. I didn't have to pay for the privilege.

It's not even like you can't do "live experience testing" after a game is released, as many long updated games demonstrate. Like, a lot of people think well of No Man's Sky these days despite its disastrous release; what if anything would have changed if they were "in Early Access" for another few years instead? Or, if Terraria, which has been well-regarded across most of its post-release development time since 2011, was also "Early Access" up until the last in a long line of free content patches? The point where you start accepting money, I think, is a pretty bright line between "live testing" and "just selling you a product." Which version ultimately ends up being the formal "1.0" is often something you couldn't even identify from within the game itself.

[ghostymegastuffs]

what is a 67?

[nuclearspaceheater]

Sumireko's debut game, Urban Legend in Limbo, was released on 2015-05-10, just over 11 years ago as of this post. That's older than Mountain of Faith (2007-08-17) was when Urban Legend in Limbo was released.

[samueldays]

Factorio, the nerd game of sometimes wondering "Why the heck do I have 90K spare railroad segments in storage?"

The top three items are intuitively reasonable: Wood gets sent to storage a lot when I dispatch robots to auto-clear large swathes of forest and build machinery there. Copper cables are a very common intermediate product, used for a zillion other things. Processor units ("blue chips") are an advanced intermediate product, used for slightly less than a zillion things but more valuable things.

But I have no memory of these 90K rails.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Actually I find the rails substantially less baffling than a lot of other things there. I've had that happen when a botched circuit -> logistics limit transition let rail production run continuously for a while. But how are copper wires getting into storage instead of direct insertion or intra-line belts? They'd get picked up in removals but did you really remove enough things to get to 104k of them? A lot of other intermediates are things that I'd put storage removal blocks for (requestor chest for iron ore in front of the iron smelters, for example), but I can see someone not bothering with that. Except, processor units are expensive enough that I'd still expect those to be pulled from storage automatically before they got to 98k. But maybe those are all just habits from some combination of playing to efficiency as aesthetic goal and from before infinite mining productivity (and before it was available pre-post-game).

[samueldays]

Thought process went something like: "I want to supply blue chips in bulk to the many rocket silos for orbital throughput. Bots are bad at bulk transport in a megabase, a long-distance belt gets unwieldy, let me use a train so it can share rails with other trains. The train has travel time between production and consumption areas, so instead of unloading directly to local belt, I'll unload the train into chests that serve as a buffer to belt." and then I had 3 cargo wagons unloading into 18 chests that are full of blue chips. In retrospect, that buffer was overkill.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Ah, I suppose once you're at the level of shipping processing units by train a few ten thousand of them here and there stops seeming like so much.

I did also do something like that in some pre-1.0 version: ore train unloading was bottlenecked on belt capacity so I had them unload into active providers, which would benefit from container->container stacking, then have the furnace belts fed by sets of requestor chests nearby. Since bot throughput is proportional to the inverse of distance a relatively modest set of roboports nearby was enough to keep more belts saturated than could be saturated from conventional train->chest->belt unloading. Tho at that point this was also where direct insertion would have made sense.

[argumate]

maybe that’s how America will fund its future UBI program, by cash settlements from all the privacy infractions and skeevy behaviour committed by its largest corporations

[argumate]

lol does that really say "eligbile"

[nuclearspaceheater]

2 months ago I got an unexpected ~ 30 $ deposit into my PayPal account that I've recorded as "Settlement (?)" because research shows the originator to be a class action payout handler, but I couldn't match it up with any notice documents.

[samueldays]

Factorio, the nerd game of sometimes wondering "Why the heck do I have 90K spare railroad segments in storage?"

The top three items are intuitively reasonable: Wood gets sent to storage a lot when I dispatch robots to auto-clear large swathes of forest and build machinery there. Copper cables are a very common intermediate product, used for a zillion other things. Processor units ("blue chips") are an advanced intermediate product, used for slightly less than a zillion things but more valuable things.

But I have no memory of these 90K rails.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Actually I find the rails substantially less baffling than a lot of other things there. I've had that happen when a botched circuit -> logistics limit transition let rail production run continuously for a while. But how are copper wires getting into storage instead of direct insertion or intra-line belts? They'd get picked up in removals but did you really remove enough things to get to 104k of them? A lot of other intermediates are things that I'd put storage removal blocks for (requestor chest for iron ore in front of the iron smelters, for example), but I can see someone not bothering with that. Except, processor units are expensive enough that I'd still expect those to be pulled from storage automatically before they got to 98k. But maybe those are all just habits from some combination of playing to efficiency as aesthetic goal and from before infinite mining productivity (and before it was available pre-post-game).