Topics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO9lc3wzifY



Everything about this looks really stupid 
I mean... they couldn't even buy the rights to the "Five Nights at Freddy's" name? What are they paying Cage?

I am nearing the end of book 1 (it's a trilogy).
I think it has some positive and some (imo) not that great elements.
Overall, however, it is certainly a nice work.

Some of the things I didn't like:

Spoiler

The focus, at least in the first book, is on Ye, who in my view isn't a very interesting person, and moreover I found it not very elegantly handled how she betrayed the entire human race by deliberately inviting the Trisolarians to invade. While the premise itself is interesting (a single person avenges what was done to her by aliens invading...), I think it could have been handled way better.
Also, there are - here and there - some cheap cyberpunk elements, including some assassin and I felt like I was reading Neuromancer at that point. You guessed it: I hated Neuromancer 
The 3body.com computer game also, imo, came across as mostly silly.

[close]

Some positives:

Spoiler

Some serious science being discussed. The language isn't bad either (some descriptive abilities of the author). The plot is interesting, despite a few rather unrealistic elements.

[close]

Anyway, I can't believe that Prokhor Sakharov would declare war on Earth. But I wouldn't put it past Lady Deidre or Miriam 

Hm, I have the following questions:

-How accurate is the dating of the actual material? (eg some scroll)
-How would it be possible to have considerably less (or none at all; at least by technological means alone) accurate/valid dating of such a scroll's content? I had the idea of having the text not be penned/inked on the scroll, but carved on it (eg using some letter-blocks which remove part of the scroll to carve the letter, but if possible -better this way for me...- just by using a sharp object like a dagger. Would this work at all to make the text (carved) not possible to date? Or is it just circular and the gap would be dated (in this case, how can I do it so as to avoid this?)

(obviously this is for some short story )



To give an idea of the times: If, say, it would be possible to date (just with tech means, not linguistic - that isn't of interest atm) a manuscript (material) to the 8th-9th century AD, could the trick with carving work so as to make the content not be easy to date using the same methods?

2021 is roughly 1 hour from now (where I am...).
May it be good to us all

Apparently schools in the US (and elsewhere) ban books written "more than 70 years ago", arguing that they include racist and other corrupt ideas which will harm the children.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/even-homer-gets-mobbed-11609095872?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic textsâ€"everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacularâ€"especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”

Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”

An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.

“It’s a tragedy that this anti-intellectual movement of canceling the classics is gaining traction among educators and the mainstream publishing industry,” says science-fiction writer Jon Del Arroz, one of the rare industry voices to defend Ms. Cluess. “Erasing the history of great works only limits the ability of children to become literate.”

He’s right. If there is harm in classic literature, it comes from not teaching it. Students excused from reading foundational texts may imagine themselves lucky to get away with YA novels insteadâ€"that’s what the #DisruptTexts people wantâ€"but compared with their better-educated peers they will suffer a poverty of language and cultural reference. Worse, they won’t even know it.

Mrs. Gurdon writes the Journal’s Children’s Books column.

Literature isn't politics. If you limit what children read to "books published less than 70 years ago" you just teach something not valuable next to what others would be learning. Besides, you can't erase any notion, at best you'll block the refined expression of it and leave your students with their own means; one has to suppose the smarter ones will just dismiss your books, but they wouldn't have better models to work with.
Maybe they should also ban math stuff produced less than 70 years ago, it'd be an equally good idea.

One would do well to realize that if an idea is more valuable, it will still shine through others. Banning books cause you are afraid they may influence people is just the fear of the incompetent.
Also reminds me of the nice starting paragraph of Borges' story "The Theologians":

After having razed the garden and profaned the chalices and altars, the Huns entered the monastery library on horseback and trampled the incomprehensible books and vituperated and burned them, perhaps fearful that the letters concealed blasphemies against their god, which was an iron scimitar.

Something like in the known RTS games, eg Age of Empires series. Begin with the map being almost all unknown, and reveal parts if your units explore.
Any method?

Merry Christmas

I think this is a decently festive idea for a thread.

I could start by mentioning virtually everything by Hole, but let's pick this ridiculous band instead:

https://youtu.be/bCDIt50hRDs

You can suggest your own, as long as they were from the 90s and can be termed a hit (they don't need to have been #1 for weeks, like the terrible song in the OP; just relatively known)

I have a question, about a property of powersets. Namely:
Can you prove that any element of a set will exist in half of the set's powerset, without using the method in the proof that the number of subsets is always 2^(number of elements in the original set)?
Cause obviously it is trivial to just go "you change one of the 2s to a 1, so you have half".

(yes, I know I am still at AGS, but there's no harm in asking ^_^ )

This is a game I started making for the mags, but decided to take more time with it.

Here is a video teaser:

https://youtu.be/2LTkf3SGg1g

Some more screens:





The Byzantine Empire is used as a symbol, of isolation and sense of superiority. The game is in the horror genre

I aim to complete it before Christmas... If you feel like it, you can support by subscibing to the youtube channel (the one with the teaser video ^_^ ).

If one wanted to make a strategy game, how would they have resources like trees, which would be all over the map?
Afaik there is a hardcoded limit to number of objects, so it can't just be done with setting each resource as an object.
Also, ideally the strategy map would be one room (obviously larger than any screen)

Latest I watched was The Promised Neverland. While mostly melodrama, it is relatively cerebral (well, next to other anime) and has a cool setting and horror elements. Season 2 will be released this January...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIcjo7XVlOY

How can I change the options' names in the 9-verb interface?
I must say, I expected those to be actual sprites, but apparently they are text + graphical background?

[Scorched Earth]

I may use the story in a game - after all all my (2 ) games are adapted from stories of mine...

Scorched Earth

There was this man who, in his early years, considered himself far superior to others. He was too polite to show it â€" but it was relatively easy for him, since he thought so little of everyone else. In this state of mind he’d have cruised through childhood in a kind of pleasant trance, had he not felt the need to improve himself. And as his impression was that he’d never gain anything by comparing his accomplishments to those of his peers, it didn’t take long to reach the conclusion that the only worthy adversary could be his own intellect.

That is to say, he grew irritated by the fact â€" all too apparent to himself â€" that the mind always concealed more secrets than those it allowed him to discover, controlling vast resources which remained out of reach for the conscious self; and this he did loathe, for he wished to take all credit for his superior intellect instead of sharing it with the good brain external providence endowed him with.

Not that he ever wanted to actually work hard for his accomplishments. Being able to solve a mathematical problem in little time, or come up with ingenious plots to trick his schoolmates (when he wasn’t too disgusted by their obvious and complete inferiority) or calculate in silence and with great speed highly intricate (though not always that close to reality) courses of action in whatever predicament he found himself in (and it’s true he had a knack for finding himself in serious predicaments) was another major source of his high self-esteem. So when he decided to antagonize his own mind, it only meant that he’d stand to benefit by being consciously aware of more of that wonderful substrata on top of which he danced his way through pedestrian life and complicated thought in leaps of equal elegance.

Near the end of high-school, he had an accident which left him with a scar on his forehead. The scar wasn’t particularly large, but it could be noticed by others. What offended our man wasn’t as much the scar itself, but the evident ability of those around him to notice it, and â€" even worse â€" their audacity to use it or allude to it so as to declare they now are no longer inferior to him. Up to that point they were all too careful in signaling their wish to avoid confrontation; but now many became openly hostile and their attacks had much of the ruthlessness and newly-found callousness of the miraculously emancipated slave against a fallen former master. On the other hand we should be fair and note that, during the first days of having to walk around school with the scar, prior to those devastating and humiliating skirmishes, he almost felt relieved in thinking that his minor disfigurement might be enough to finally afford others the chance of being identified as closer to him â€" not full equals, but closer to parity â€" and this because he did, in fact, wish to be able to co-exist and form true friendships, but couldn’t allow himself to do it back when everyone seemed so terrible next to him. However he soon realized that those others had no intention of merely having his scar slightly diminishing his superiority, instead choosing to see it as proof of their newly gained superiority over him. This really came as a shock!

And there was another thing: by now he couldn’t just allocate all of his time to his ingenious thinking and the unheard-of campaign against his own mind. Bit by bit he was being forced to focus on his immediate surroundings, attempting to save as much as he could while always on the retreat from the scorched earth tactics others run on him. His grades started to suffer and due to his nervous disposition he acquired the fear of being unable to graduate from school â€" at night he’d torment himself, imagining that years would pass and he still would be in the same classroom, passed-over by generations of new students, a curiosity, the most queer of failures. Nothing of the sort happened. He graduated along with the rest of his class, although with a deep-seated melancholy.

The old, bizarre contest against his own mind would resurface in his first year of university â€" but you see, by that time he had forgotten most of his past, and couldn’t recognize the emissary of this enemy internal side was waving the white flag of reconciliation. He only saw a hideous monster rising abruptly from the abyss of his mental world, just as he was trying to salvage the tiny speck of the ground the external enemies had overlooked in their routine skirmishes, and considered this an entirely novel threat, one of the gravest kind yet.

One night â€" the first semester of his studies hadn’t yet ended â€" the man of our story suffered so acute a mental breakdown that any return to even a semblance of normalcy would be out of reach for a great many years to come.

Any idea how to make a 2d building, shown only from the front, a bit more lively?

The above is wip, obviously

[write up to 500 words]

This is a flash fiction contest, so you are allowed to write up to 500 words.

Like Mandle, I'd also like to keep the voting to "favorite","second favorite", "third favorite" etc.

Regarding the theme: To be on-topic you just need to be brooding, in whatever way. You can still try to twist that in a humorous way, but have to include something actually menacing/depressing in the story

You can post your story by October 15.

It would really be useful. I suppose one way to do it would be to allow for simple rotations and perspective through a built-in image manipulator similar to the one in Gimp (and an alternative way would be to have those not even with the images rotated/twisted in real time, but allow for pics in a progression of such rotations and perspective twists).
In this way you could link everything up and allow the sense that the room is 3d.

Not sure if I can do something like this with the current engine (I doubt it, due to inability to ghost-move images, ie afaik they have to move to a point by passing a whole area?).

[thousands]

My adblocking program shows literally thousands of ads being blocked!!!
Never seen such a thing in any other site Can you explain the weird ad-counting phenomenon? (I mean surely there wouldn't be 10.000 ads if I just turned it off, but why does it count so many?)

For comparison, it counts less than 10 ads in largish game forums, like for the Civilization games or Total War.

So, the trailer is released.

https://youtu.be/n9xhJrPXop4

I don't like it.
Music is inferior to the Lynch one.
General feel seems inferior too - apart from the Vladimir Harkonnen guy, who looks interesting and is played by a good actor, and The beast Rabban, whose casting is also great (Dave Bautista).
The Worm imo doesn't look as good as in other adaptations. And some of the casting is missing the mark by a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMJODbx_kGY

I made it for my youtube channel, but some may recognize I used part of the scene for This is the Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku79lUc2DMc

You can suggest improvements. Atm I am using some filters, so the textures/colors can easily change.
This is again adapted from a short story of mine, like This is the Way.

If you feel like it, subscribe to the youtube channel for updates (and other stuff) ^_^