• 3 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • cacher does, but cache as in “cache-toi !” (go hide!) and “je me cache” (I’m hiding) are pronounced “cash”.

    Besides, “correct” pronunciation in a different language is pretty meaningless. The word may have come from French but we’re speaking English, not French.

    Also, it might not be a loan word so much as a legacy-of-foreigners-taking-over word (c.f. the Normand invasion of Britain), which doesn’t tend to help the language’s users care about respecting the “original” pronunciation. I’m not certain when exactly cachet entered English.






  • Pretty good review!

    I’ve not yet been to all the new planets. What I have seen lines up well with the characterization of Wube strategically disabling the things in the base game / on the starting planet (“Nauvis”) that I grew accustomed to. Instead of simply adding ever more lengthy production line recipes, they have forced us to approach many existing production lines in a drastically different way.

    In the base game, you can play around with ratios and targeted throughput, but you almost always will have the same machines crafting the same recipes, in the same order. The most significant decision when designing a production line is often whether to bring an item in by belt or instead bring its components and craft it adjacently.

    Space Age shakes that up by introducing several new choices/decisions to make. There are alternate recipes to be unlocked (similar in function to Satisfactory, without needing to hunt for hard drives on a map). There are now multiple “looping” recipes (the input items can be part of the output). Most notably, which recipes are available to you depends on where you are building - not only planetside vs in-orbit, but planetside vs in-orbit across all planets. The planets have different resources on them, and their orbits contain different ratios of resource-laden asteroids. Same goes for the routes between planets!

    I was very afraid that the extension would feel like “more of the same, just longer and more tedious”. That’s the experience I’ve had with most overhaul mods I’ve tried, and notably why I never bothered paying Space Exploration (whose author ended up working with Wube on the Space Age extension). So far my experience has been the exact opposite. It really feels like every single new “thing” feeds back into the core gameplay by “rejuvenating” it in new ways.


  • Wow, I didn’t realize that C.S. Lewis was riffing off of 1 Corinthians: 13 when he wrote (emphasis mine)

    When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.



  • There’s a scene in the game where the character is taking a shower. The shower stall is glass, and the glass is frosted from around ankle height to neck height.

    I haven’t played the game myself, just came across the scene on YouTube several years ago, so I don’t know how justifiable the choice of the scene is in the first place. At least, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to me that they modeled the full nude body so that the frosted glass would blur what we “see” in a realistic way. It’s a lot easier to model something and then have the glass blur it, instead of directly modelling the blurred version for example.

    Personally I think most of the creep factor comes from the fact that this character is explicitly modeled after a live human being who presumably didn’t sign up for that.










  • Political violence has absolutely no place in a healthy society

    But we aren’t in a healthy society. If anything, this shooting is proof of it. This isn’t an excuse. This is a claim that your arguments will fall on deaf ears.

    I’m not cheering this (I would go as far as saying that I hate what happened), but I don’t think people who have/are doing so, are displaying abject character or intellectual dishonesty. I think they are misreading the current political context, and I think nothing good will come of this.

    Trump has caused unknowable deaths from the policies put into place during his presidency, and with Project 2025 would (will?) cause even more.

    Pacifism becomes extremism when it cares more about policing and shaming those who vent their frustration at the current state of things. “missed the exit ramp to utopia” is a hell of a way to convince people to listen to what you have to say with an open mind.

    Political violence has been happening for years, and this is what gets us a mod post ? I would venture that I am just as disappointed in my fellow lemmings as you are, but frankly, this feels almost as tone-deaf and unhelpful as those calling for blood.

    Now is the time for constructive advice. Bandying about “extremism” helps no cause but that of inaction.

    You want a better society? Go outside and organize. Help people feel prepared for their future. Leave those calling for blood on an online forum to be picked up by the feds and law enforcement. Or talk to people like you care about them, not picking up after the mess they will make.

    People are dying of hunger, of lack of shelter, of preventable diseases, of working 3 jobs without breaking even, and they just saw one of the rich fucks that spent 4 years making their lives worse dodge death and supercharge his followers. Now you expect them to calm down because someone online invokes “rational, independent thinkers”, after preemptively accusing them of downvoting a post that they have yet to read.

    Shooting Trump is not how we get through this. Making this post with this tone is not how we get through this, either. I don’t have the answers beyond “find a better way to get your point across or you will just push away those you are trying to reach”. Hopefully I have not, myself, fallen into the same trap with this comment.