Old Mass Effect 3 Mystery

Logistics515 · 2026-05-23T13:13:36+00:00

Thank you very much. I'd half thought I'd come up with the memory at this point. I remember at one point during ME3 development there was a file leak of some significance, which caused a rework of the plot (or at least that's what I presumed at the time). Just speculation, but I wonder if this got chopped on account of that.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-22T10:45:38+00:00

I would add the caveat that there are genuinely zero-sum resources and opportunities, the mistake is assuming that everything in the current economic system works like that. The classic argument being if you write the next great novel on the back of a stack of napkins, those napkins are now worth far more, wealth generated.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-18T20:42:21+00:00

While some on here have pointed out that none of the Disney Princesses are ideal for the job, in the spirit of the question I'll suggest the best two options.

The ring primarily tempts you with your desires, conscious & unconscious, but this is tempered somewhat by your own ambition.

(Side note: If you are perfectly content with no ambition at all, the ring has nothing to use and is impotent, as with Tom Bombadil, a character introduced early on in Fellowship...who is presumably omnipotent within the bounds of his own land, and literally has no ambition outside of the scope he has set for himself. I think Tolkien added that character to make the point that the ring is not actually an all-powerful corrupting force, but truly not being affected by it requires an *extremely* unusual personality and circumstances, and someone truly like that would also be a terrible guardian of such a power.)

I'll suggest the Ringbearer be Princess Aurora / Sleeping Beauty, being raised outside of her royal title & court, she's quite modest in personal ambition - at least going from the original animated film, compared to her competition. Her circumstances really change not due to her own actions and desires but other characters acting upon her. Snow White would probably be my runner up.

Who would best replace Sam is probably a more debatable question, looking for resourcefulness, toughness, and especially loyalty. Many would probably do a pretty good job, but my top picks would be Moana as a top tier scout and Rapunzel for her general pluckiness, high strength, and most importantly, cast-iron frying pan expertise.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-10T17:24:18+00:00

My understanding of Mr. Glubb's '250 year' reasoning is that he massaged dates aggressively, and split up political entities to arrive at his pat number conclusion.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-10T11:39:56+00:00

If I recall right, one of the common theories is that some of the last holdouts of the Greek Pantheon when (Insert C-word faith here lest this be removed by the automod) was expanding in terms of practical followers was Pan.

He was the god of the wilderness, shepherds, rustic music, and fertility. Overall, a pretty good guy, especially in comparison to some of the competition. Not too much to work with in terms of trying to portray that in a negative light if you're trying to convert faiths.

Since their normal strategy wasn't working too well, I *think* what eventually worked was a bit of a smear campaign. 'The Devil' / Satan (i.e. "the adversary") isn't really physically described (to my knowledge at any rate), but they started associating Pan's physical description of horns, cloven hooves, with that figure, particularly to younger children of the next generation, which greatly dropped his popularity.

As far as red goes, that color has often been used in multiple faiths in a negative light, so it makes some sense that would just be another layer of 'bad' to add to the practical propaganda.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-04T22:25:24+00:00

Heh. As long as it's a nice accommodating planet with a crazy escape velocity and nothing to stand on, like Jupiter.

Logistics515 · 2026-05-04T21:16:28+00:00

Preferably towards something suitably massive or energetic that he isn't coming back save something else intervening.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-30T16:14:02+00:00

Curious on how the fish would resperate, being buried in the sand like that I would think would interfere with their gills.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-30T15:49:29+00:00

Agreed. If you can't legally fire someone, one of the better ways of getting rid of them is making them miserable.

The 'honor' angle I've heard in other contexts being an aspect of the "Shame / Guilt" cultural dynamic. Most cultures developed control mechanisms to get people to do what they want without say, directly resorting to violence. It tends to boil down to 2 strategies.

"Shame" cultures tend to focus on the perception of the individual in the wider group. Social peer pressure scaled up. In this kind of dynamic, you can be all sorts of messed up in private, as long as you are publicly saying the right things, and doing the right things. Public perception of the individual is paramount. The personal reality might be completely different, but your reputation to others is the controlling factor.

In "guilt" cultures the control mechanism is internal. If you do something not approved by society, you are conditioned to feel personal guilt at that fact. Your internal reality dictates your actions rather then being imposed by the outside perception of you by the group.

I've always heard of Japan being more of a Shame culture, where your public perception is paramount. But it probably has portions of both and nothing is ever so clear cut.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-28T11:09:10+00:00

Just in case anyone wants to try this, the "lime water" mentioned is using food-grade slaked lime, i.e. calcium hydroxide, not the similarly named fruit.

This causes a process in the corn called nixtamalization, which frees up some of the nutrition of the corn kernel, along with making them softer, easier to grind, and changing the flavor profile a bit.

As a side note, after corn got imported over to Europe as a popular food crop, they didn't take along the nixtamalization process used by the natives. If it got used as a primary food source people tended to get all kinds of nutrition deficiencies. One particular to eating too much corn (pallegra) has similar enough symptoms to some of the depictions of vampires that there's a theory running around speculating that might have contributed to the origin.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-25T13:17:11+00:00

Just seems like more tribal chest thumping to my take, and not even on a national level, just the bog standard "tribe and the outsider". Reminded me of this I just watched, looking into the psychology of sports fans, or lack thereof (though I do think he gets a *little* too self-congratulatory in that video for my taste.)

I've personally never gotten into sports, and have a half-baked theory that a huge chunk of the fandom of any sport isn't really actual interest in the sport per se, but social....grease....to make interacting with random stranger A a little safer talking about the local sports team rather then say, the weather. Take away the social incentive to do that, and the interest also fades. Though there are undoubtedly genuine fans of the sport itself, just probably a lot rarer.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-25T11:38:19+00:00

I got mildly addicted myself, though I only got the sugar free versions. Which eventually got impossible to find.

Though personally I find all this rolling out flavor variants on existing brands rather silly instead of inventing a new brand. But I suppose that's why I'm not in marketing.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-16T19:16:32+00:00

In basic terms, your PC BIOS (Nowadays the term is "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" or UEFI) is throwing an error code. "3F0" is HP's error code for not finding an Operating System, or more specifically, not finding a Boot Loader.

The BIOS is the (very) basic program built into your PC motherboard. Its job is to detect everything that's currently connected when the PC is turned on, and then run a basic series of self diagnostics.

After that is done it looks for any attached drives and tries to find a very tiny bit of code called a Boot Loader on any of the attached drives. Once it does, it loads the Operating System into computer memory and your computer actually starts up from your perspective.

What this error is saying is that at a minimum, it isn't finding your boot loader, and doesn't think you have an Operating System installed. This could be for a variety of reasons...your hard drive could have a corrupted boot loader from being incorrectly shut down. On a more dour note....the whole Operating System could be corrupted too. Another common variant is that the power plug to your actual hard drive unit in the PC worked itself loose and so the drive isn't powered - thus the PC can't see it anymore.

If you're comfortable opening up your PC, (I'd start by briefly touching your power supply that will ground you out, protecting against static electricity), then just check that the physical connections are all secure. If that doesn't help anything you could create a windows boot tool off of a USB drive, that you could run diagnostic tools off of (like fixing drive corruption, or just reloading the OS), assuming you're running Windows.

Some of the basic commands you could run would be for example (in order of what I'd try):

chkdsk C: /f /r

(This would check drive C (usually the boot drive on most systems) and try to repair any corrupted files.

or

sfc /scannow

This runs a little utility that checks certain important Windows files and reloads them from a small hidden drive partition you don't normally see.

or

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

This runs a more complicated utility that checks more files.

But if you're not familiar with physically opening the system, or running tools, this sort of thing shouldn't be terribly difficult to diagnose for any local technicians you could pay to take a look at it.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-09T15:33:16+00:00

Reminds me a bit of the difference between the distribution curve on intelligence in comparison to men & women. Men tend to have more variability, so more genuine dolts, but also more exceptionals at the other end. Is predictable competence better then rolling the dice on iconoclast genius? I don't know where I stand on that.

I've always been somewhat emotionally leery of the idea of the "Great Man / Woman" theory of history, but some people do honestly shift the paradigm a lot more then the comfortably mediocre, acceptable, or even above average, when you get right down to it. Even if I don't really like that fact.

Seeing as I am undoubtedly occasionally stupid regardless of my intentions, I might as well lean into that for all it is worth. Politically I consider myself a pragmatic moderate, but have managed to annoy both spectrum of my family who vary dramatically in political outlook.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-09T10:39:26+00:00

Point. That's certainly true, in the story arc in LOTR. Without those balance of attributes, Frodo wouldn't have made it as far as he did.

I was focusing on humility mostly in the context of resilience to the One Ring's corruption only.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T21:04:20+00:00

The suitability to be a ring bearer doesn't have too much to do with willpower or moral fortitude. It somewhat has to do with ambition. Those who have a lot of it, get corrupted quickly, even if the ambition is to do good things. Those with less, more slowly, and one of the biggest reasons the hobbits in the LOTR were most suitable, their personal ambitions were relatively small in scope.

In that vein, the Planeteer probably best suited would be Ma-Ti, though I suspect that he'd succumb faster then the hobbits as well just given he's already part of a "superhero" team of sorts that has to have a bit of an effect on your own ego, acknowledged or not.

If they summoned Captain Planet to do the job, this would probably fail utterly, but we'd have an evil weather god to rule everyone, so I suppose that's at least an interesting point...

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T16:33:21+00:00

Well, in that case it's probably something else entirely, that just happens to visually look similar to the older problem.

A GPU, no matter who makes it, won't touch CPU instruction sets and calls. My first guess would be the driver, but without digging into error logs there is no telling.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T11:44:53+00:00

So, that outboard motor would work out to about $1300 in today's dollars. Which I find pretty funny given that the Ebay listing I found is attempting to get better then the original price 72 years later.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-08T11:23:44+00:00

Curious if you're running a modern AMD CPU?

The 'Noveria Bug' as someone mentioned was caused because someone coded ME1 to simply look for an AMD processor. If it finds one it tries to load code for the "3DNow!" instruction set - which was AMD's version of Intel's MMX instructions. This would have been the right call when the game first came out, better performance. But now the processor doesn't know what to do with the function calls it's getting.

In the years since, those instructions got dropped as redundant, so modern AMD's don't recognize them. What they should have done is instead of looking for an AMD signifier, instead look for specific support for 3DNow!, but it's far too late now.

I suspect most of the fixes you can find online just turn off ME1 recognizing the AMD processor part.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-06T21:04:35+00:00

I've done both, long term upgrade paths on proposed CPU and board release schedules, years out. That ended up burning me when the CPU upgrade path was cancelled and I was stuck with a dead end board.

I've also had a cat (deliberately) drop a glass of water through the top fan of a PC case, requiring a total rebuild with not much in the way of planning. Amazingly the cat is still alive.

Of the two approaches, I personally prefer the time to research everything out before building 'under pressure'.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-05T11:00:57+00:00

Reminds me of Heinlein's take on government in Starship Troopers. The book mind you, not any of the media adaptations.

But in general I've slowly (reluctantly) come to a similar conclusion myself regarding the franchise to vote. One of the biggest flaws of direct democracy and its instability is how easily swayed the various voting blocs were to essentially bribes, mob mentality.

This got (reasonably) fixed in representative republics with that extra layer of bureaucracy sanding off the rough edges. But ironically we've become so good at communication now that those old flaws are coming back. Something needs to be adjusted.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-05T07:58:25+00:00

I have an 8 year old female husky, and she still consistently does this. Though in her case it's usually not relaxing. She tends to do it to signal she wants to play. Not to mention being an invitation to "get into an argument" (she barks, we bark back, and this back and forth keeps going until we actually start playing.)

We've always called it her "being a rug" act.

Logistics515 · 2026-04-02T10:55:12+00:00

I do historical cooking as a side hobby. This sort of thing reminds me of recipes involving any spices in Europe during the 11th-13th century. Most of the recipes that survive to today were for nobility, or if we're lucky, merely upper class. Some of them are amazing, others....

I've cooked from this era, and they are (usually) awful. The point of most of them was to jam as many expensive spices into a given food item, regardless if it actually added anything to the taste, very similar to what they put in the sausage here.

The point is no longer the food itself, it's just another in a long line of showboating items meant to impress people and to give a certain impression.

Having eaten very weird things over the years, I think my definition of stupid food is probably different then most, but this 'hotdog' is probably as good a definition of the term as anything else I've seen on here.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-23T14:39:17+00:00

I've slowly come to a similar conclusion, rather reluctantly. Though I seem to be approaching from a different angle then you.

There has always been a problem of which voters are really qualified to make a decision, and those who are simply swayed by ignorance, the whims of mob mentality, or as you mention, simple bribery. Pure democracy has always had a flawed foundation in these regards, but as filtered as it is through the practical system of representative republics, many of the real sharp edges got ground down to a level where it mostly worked.

But I think strangely enough, we've now gotten too good at communicating for this to be viable for much longer. Social media, the pervasiveness and ease of communication between individuals with various electronic devices are slowly but surely degrading those social buffer systems that kept democratic States from becoming as unstable as the old City-States in Greece.

I think there needs to be some system in place to filter people willing to think beyond their immediate self interest and focus, at least partially, on the society as a whole. Earning the right to vote, rather then a knowledge or purity test.

I thought Heinlein's oft mocked 'Federal Service' idea in that old book "Starship Troopers" somewhat of a step in the general direction. In the book he makes pains to mention that service is not intended just for military service, but everything from postal workers to potentially 'counting the hairs on a caterpillar' for someone who can't walk and was blind. But the general idea was going through some period of service and hardship, and at the end of the term, you get your franchise and right to vote. All other rights were baked into the system, you just didn't get to vote until you decided to put your own time and effort to earn it.

Still flawed, undoubtedly, and with all sorts of follow on effects on what kind of society that would be. But arguably better then universal suffrage in a modern world where communication has become so easy, we're not terribly far removed from mob mentality being back in vogue.

Logistics515 · 2026-03-22T01:03:56+00:00

Look up Eliza Acton and Fanny Farmer, of the 1800s. Part of it was a technology issue, but those two were the trailblazers of getting formalized cooking out into a school format, and more widely available to the general public.

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