I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Varitek?

That scene is a triumph of Federation ideology.

Finding the wormhole was a lucky accident, but everything else which lead to that apparent deus ex machina came about from Starfleet doing exactly what was needed to get the Prophets on their side: not with the intention or expectation of that ultimate result, but because it slotted right in with what the Federation wants to do anyway.

Sicko and his crew communicate with these strange life forms in they find, and make an effort to not only understand them but respect their wishes. They offer enormous practical support to Bajor and attempt to encourage them to join the Federation formally, but they respect the wishes of the Bajorans even when highly inconvenient (such as the abrupt pivot away from Federation membership that preceded the Dominion War). In short, Sisko and the government backing him legitimately earned the trust of both Bajor and the Prophets by being explorers, diplomats, and excellent allies. The military payoff they got is hardly the point, but they earned it.

Would any of the other races have earned the favor of the Prophets the way the Federation did? The Klingons, Romulans, and obviously the Cardassians would have taken over as brutal occupiers if they felt the need to get involved with Bajor at all. The Ferengi would have ruthlessly exploited Bajoran resources in their own way (which we know the Prophets were no fans of, see their temporary rewiring of Grand Nagus Zek), while the Borg would have simply consumed everything they found useful. Here, it’s the uniquely decent actions and values of the Federation that win out.

This is one of the many things that Strange New Worlds (and Lower Decks as well) have got right. Space battles in SNW are beautifully animated, but they aren’t overwhelmed with excess visual spectacles and they tend to be fundamentally simple: you shoot at us, we shoot back or try to find some helpful obstruction to hide behind, etc.

Even Prodigy’s big space battle in their finale manages the task to some degree, despite it’s scale. I remember watching it felt oddly sluggish, as the ratio of ships on screen to weapons being fired was surprisingly low, but it definitely made it easier to keep track of whatever specific event the camera was focussed on.

It’s not the figure that’s the problem, but the fact that Americans have been forced to accept this sort of casual deception in how the price of a standard good is advertised. Why is it okay that getting gas for “$3.50” per gallon (to quote the most visible price, which everyone will mention in conversation and mentally reference for comparison) is actually very slightly less than $3.51 per gallon? Just post the correct bloody price, in a clear and unambiguous manner, without faffing around with extra decimals that everyone mentally filters out anyway. It’s stupid.

Same deal with American businesses consistently citing pre-tax (and where relevant, pre-tup) prices. Just tell people what the fuck they are actually going to pay, instead of agreeing that literally everyone has to make their pricing an exercise in consumer deception or be beaten out by everyone else’s smaller-looking-but-actually-identical prices.

This whole thing is just another tiny window into why unregulated markets suck.

Au contrarie; sports are a fantastic way to get socioeconomic issues (like labor rights) front and center on the minds of people who wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of them the same way. And they create opportunities for people to educate themselves in other areas as well. Not every sports fan is the willfully ignorant meathead you describe, nor do willfully ignorant meatheads exist because of sports.

MLB is not only a state sponsored monopoly, but like every other American sports league a blatant cartel which is constantly squabbling with its own employees over revenue shares (at the expense of the on-field product) and lying about how much money they actually make. Same thing as most other business owners, but people are a lot more willing to listen to the perspective of, say, Shoehi Ohtani than a random McDonald’s employee. I can tell you that I am personally much more clued in on these sorts of societal problems as a result of sportswriters discussing labor issues, on top of being far more statistically savvy and generally more sceptical of oversimplified narratives than I would be if I had never gained an interest in baseball. Nor would I have anywhere near my current understanding of global politics without global football (soccer) creating both a mechanism and incentive for learning about them.

But that’s not even the point: sports are not a “scam”. Sports exist first and foremost because for many people, watching elite athletes play a game is fun. That is the intrinsic value of professional sports, and nothing about that is inherently scammy. Full stop.

You realize that ChatGPT has no concept of “true”, right? It produces output which looks coherent and reasonable and tends to stumble into truthful statements on accident, by virtue of drawing from a dataset of people saying mostly true things. Of course, the bot is equally capable of spouting off outright lies in an equally convincing manner.

This is a very unreliable way to verify a surprising fact. I strongly recommend against it.

It’s the lack of really small, niche, but still relatively active communities that is the biggest loss for me (so far). For example, I want to to talk about Brentford FC, a tiny English football club which was only promoted to the Premier League a couple of years ago. But we’re a million miles away from that when there are exactly two communities for general soccer and one community for Liverpool FC, all three with exactly one subscriber.

Any other Bees fans out there? This Flekken guy seems pretty promising, even if I had hopes for Alban Lafont.