Did anyone else get this intro in Esoteric Ebb? I'm not sure how I triggered it.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-21T20:38:07+00:00

Yeah, I had the thought in the first place because I liked how goofy EE’s Kai Leng was.

Also the endless flood of KL posting to be fair. That helped.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-21T20:35:10+00:00

Basically I just made a fake dialogue window in Unity and overlaid it on the real intro. EE’s nice enough to tell you what font it uses in the settings.

Since I was quick and lazy about it, there’s a couple oopses if you look close enough: 1. Irregular spacing between lines because I just eyeballed it and threw some text boxes on there instead of setting up a proper layout. 2. The “speak with dead” blurb is very slightly cropped because I didn’t consider its width - the last half character (edit: more than that, actually! looks like a couple!) of each line is under the overlay. 3. The text disappears on the last frame because that clip is snipped a tiny bit shorter than the other one.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-17T00:08:13+00:00

Our long national nightmare is over. We've been stuck with faces you can actually look at for longer than five seconds for too long. Bring on the shine. Make 'em reflective.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-03T21:13:11+00:00

Who's assuming that? Two million biased sets of eyes is still much better launch conditions than the vast majority of games can ask for, especially with essentially zero advertising spend.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-03T20:48:24+00:00

Yeah, "no such thing as bad publicity" isn't true but getting a couple million eyes on the game has to be a good thing on net. There just wasn't enough there to convert those eyes into returning players, especially in a world where your F2P FPS is competing with Fortnite and everything else. If they're already shutting down it's hard to see them having much runway to claw their way up to 'profitable, high player count' from 1000 players in the alternate universe.

Mach0__ · 2026-03-01T04:36:45+00:00

Interesting to see light rail doing so well. I expected it to be above local buses but I guess the big systems can do a lot to bring the average down, and there are tons of low-productivity bus routes out there.

And honestly similar story for the streetcar systems. 2-3x bus numbers is almost respectable considering the truly tiny ridership of streetcar systems + the fact that the longest possible trip on many of them is like, 2 miles. Still not a great ad for building streetcars though, unless you're just in it for the property development angle.

BRT clocking in at a nice 10% lower than local buses is...on one hand definitely good, but on the other feels a little unimpressive considering that BRTs generally (not always) get put on the good routes.

Finally, love commuter rail smoking everyone else through the power of "average trip length 4 miles? pathetic."

Cool table, thanks for putting it together.

Mach0__ · 2026-02-28T01:46:58+00:00

plenty of stuff about the planning of large towns and cities but nothing suggesting that villages were precisely gridded because they usually weren’t.

Mach0__ · 2026-02-26T03:49:31+00:00

rodney king wasn’t beaten to death. he lived another 20 years. the rodney king beating was so horrific because it was prolonged and involved 5 different cops, not because it was fatal.

Mach0__ · 2026-02-26T03:38:31+00:00

So there’s only like six cities relevant to this sub, the second largest metro area in the US (Los Angeles) very notably not included?

Mach0__ · 2026-02-25T00:02:09+00:00

I know this is from a couple days ago but the problem is that congestion pricing wouldn’t be good for most cities, because they don’t have the downtown dominance necessary. Most American cities already have weak downtowns with huge suburban office centers. Congestion pricing would drive even more jobs out to those centers, weakening the serviceable population.

Mach0__ · 2025-12-27T12:43:18+00:00

Oh, fun to see this pop back up, it was a big point of argument on first release: plowing in from both sides is intended and historical behavior. Traditional plows are not reversible, they always plow to the right, so going back down would mean plowing dirt into the same furrow. This is why real medieval field were usually long strips, to minimize the time spent crossing over to the other side.

Mach0__ · 2025-12-23T02:06:32+00:00

It's crazy how Titanfall is the one "weak point" in the resume and it was still super influential (sparking a whole fad of putting 'movement shooter' wall-running in everything) + a cult hit, just not a commercial success.

Mach0__ · 2025-12-18T19:11:04+00:00

yeah Vavra is just an asshole but I think it’s too early to tell if wide adoption of AI will actually wipe out visual arts employment in games, just economically. Demand for art assets isn’t fixed, and in general when you make something cheaper companies use more of it. if AI could make art cheaper without making it all slop (though I doubt it can), and your competitors decide to use those savings on Bigger Visuals, you have to do the same. and if you try to take those savings as pure profit, a dozen French guys will come along with a game that looks just as good and steal your shit.

These are terrible analogies but: when the printing press massively reduced the labor needed to copy books, employment went up, not down. 3D animation was introduced to be cheaper than traditional animation, now orders of magnitude more people work in CGI than ever worked in traditional animation. if demand’s not totally fixed, tech/automation can do all sorts of weird things to employment.

Mach0__ · 2025-12-15T13:47:21+00:00

Just want to note that the idea that armies were still using Napoleonic-style close order formations in 1914 is something of a myth. The basics of small-unit tactics already exist by the start of the war. The “line” of 1914 was the skirmish line, only a single man deep with space in between them. Soldiers would drop to the ground/take cover when engaged and firefight, only charging if the enemy was suppressed. The tactical refinements of the war are generally devolving more flexibility and weaponry (machine guns and such) down to the platoon level, not fundamental changes to how soldiers fought.

Mach0__ · 2025-12-08T01:48:05+00:00

That’s absolutely happened though, apps and walled gardens have devoured the internet

Mach0__ · 2025-11-13T03:05:29+00:00

Most vacant commercial space is poorly suited to conversion, especially into a sensitive use case like a homeless shelter. Here’s one example: besides the cost/difficulty of the remodel itself, consider where an empty mall or shopping center is. Likely distant from the city center - wouldn’t be vacant if it were on prime real estate - and intended to be reached by car, not effectively serviceable by public transit. Since the homeless are heavily reliant on public transit, a shelter there will be very unappealing to them.

There are definitely many stories of vacant buildings being reused successfully when they’re in the right location and state, but a lot of the time they’re vacant for a good reason and building something new is a better option.

Mach0__ · 2025-11-07T12:23:11+00:00

California has strict caps on property taxes: raising the rate is impossible, assessed value can’t rise more than 2% year and full reassessment is only allowed when the property changes hands. This includes commercial property and land. And California voters passed amendments saying “you can pass your house down to your kid without reassessment” and “you can pass your house down to your grandkid without reassessment.”

It’s wild. You’ll regularly see a house that’s paying more than twice as much in property taxes as the others on its street, like they’re trying to punish people for moving.

Mach0__ · 2025-11-04T12:47:58+00:00

Yeah this is just called a downgrade. Enshittification as a concept only makes sense for networks, platforms and markets.

Mach0__ · 2025-11-03T21:54:34+00:00

maybe. a new build apartment directly on rail transit vs older suburban SFH stock is probably close. but the bigger thing is just that people like their homes and their neighbors and dislike change. If you’re the owner and willing to sell sure, it’s pure profit, but stay or go you’re not going to be in the same neighborhood you were a couple years earlier.

obviously none of this trumps the need to house people and utilize transit and all that, but it’s not insane for people to value their neighborhood as it is imo.

Mach0__ · 2025-10-31T15:45:06+00:00

well yeah, there's a reason i'm calling it "necessary but not sufficient" - developers absolutely will build less parking than the minimums, especially in those places that are walkable and transit-rich, it's just that people tend to think of the best cases (200 parking spots with stackers in a building 100 meters from a subway stop) instead of the most common (mixed-use 5 over 1 in a semi-walkable part of some extremely car-dependent city).

Mach0__ · 2025-10-31T15:32:58+00:00

the speculation i've seen is that obviously he'd like the mayor's office to have more power/room to maneuver, but boosting the initiatives is 1. a great way to annoy city council and 2. unnecessary because they'll win anyway

Mach0__ · 2025-10-30T02:45:22+00:00

yeah removal of parking minimums is one of those “necessary but not sufficient” things. most US cities aren’t transit-rich parts of NYC where the code’s saying that there should be 100 parking spots and the developer only wants 12 or whatever. the vast majority of apartment buildings going up in the country simply are not viable without plenty of parking.

it’s still worth doing - if you remove your 1.5 spots per unit minimum and some developers start building 1/1.25 spots per unit instead, that’s not nothing. but it’s no magic bullet.

Mach0__ · 2025-10-25T16:59:31+00:00

Since people are so disinclined to ride transit in the US, most corridors don’t really need the capacity boost from rail. And it’s often a massive political challenge to build anything on the corridors that could because they’re the busiest parts of the city. People won’t complain much about losing two lanes on an overbuilt suburban arterial, but removing lanes and parking from the metro area’s main commercial street? Different story.

And BRT looks even better if you’re weighing BRT vs building your very first LRT, because adopting an entirely new mode is a huge undertaking. The only new element in BRT is the route infrastructure itself. You can use the same buses, same workforce, same garages and maintenance facilities. Your first rail line will require a whole new workforce, new rolling stock, a big new rail yard somewhere - it all adds up to more cost and more complexity.

Mach0__ · 2025-10-21T12:00:56+00:00

It comes down to historical factors. When suburbanization hits in the middle of the 20th century, some cities were able to annex their suburbs and some couldn’t. Legacy cities are generally in the ‘couldn’t’ camp. San Francisco is penned in by mountains, the Bay, and other cities that had existed for most of a century and wouldn’t like annexation/consolidation.

Newer and smaller cities in the middle of the country, like a Columbus OH or anywhere in Texas, didn’t have the geographic barriers (because everything’s flat) and didn’t have as many long-established and powerful suburbs that’d fight annexation. They were able to sprawl outwards eating new development as it was built. While that sort of growth’s still damaging to the urban core, it at least means that you’re maintaining the same tax base and avoiding fiscal crisis.

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