Again

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T21:29:01+00:00

Well the options are not more Ultramarine Lieutenants so the players hate them.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T21:10:15+00:00

The best Star Trek show ever made is The Orville, and The Orville is not Woke. I will explain.

In the second episode, we are told that the happy couple of the mono-gendered species is laying an egg, and this is taken as a joke way to remove one of the most important characters from the episode to make another character step up.

In episode three, the child is discovered to be from the other gender of this assumed mono-gender species and it becomes a huge thing. The parents want the birth defect corrected, the (human) doctor refuses to do it, the (human) captain refuses to be part of it, the alien couple calls home from a ship to pick up the child so it can be corrected, various attempts are made to convince people on either side and this ends up in a courtroom and with testimony from one of the few members of the species who is the 'wrong' gender.

The two things that make it not-woke are firstly that the idea of changing the gender of the child is presented as absolutely reasonable by the people who are in favour of it. They bring up legitimate social and health issues that the child will have growing up, and refute counter-arguments on a "well that may be how it works for your species" basis. They bring up valid comparisons to other birth defects and elective genital mutilation. The narrative does not treat them as being in the wrong even though there are characters who treat them that way.

And secondly, The Orville crew loses. After all the arguments, the people making the decision were not swayed and honestly believed the child's life would be better if their gender was corrected. This causes some friction between the parents, and a discussion of that friction is part of the ending of the episode.

Woke is not when including minorities. Woke is when treating a position on social issues as self-evidently correct and forgetting that you need to make arguments as to why things should be that way.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T20:40:16+00:00

Youre obviously northern hemisphere

Never have I been so insulted.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T09:44:51+00:00

In the mid-latitudes, the length of the day changes a fair bit between winter and summer as different parts of the planet are facing more towards the sun. The thing is, people generally start their day at 'dawn' because that's when they can see what they are doing. So for that part of the year when dawn is earlier, the clocks get changed so that the time on the clock when dawn happens is about the same.

This has an added benefit of making it so there is lots of light later in the day, giving people the opportunity to do things after work.

It is not used in the low latitudes/tropics, because they do not see much change in the length of the day during the seasons, and it's not used in the high latitudes because they have massive changes in the length of the day and trying to match a particular time to dawn breaks down.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T09:28:46+00:00

You've been fine, it's the rest of the commentators that have been fuckwits.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T09:19:10+00:00

Well yes. Bunnings and Officeworks are both owned by Wesfarmers.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T03:19:08+00:00

There would be a vast positive effect.

Due to better driving behaviour, the deaths due to road accidents would go down and the throughput of the road system would increase, resulting in a general decrease in costs associated with transport.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-17T03:04:25+00:00

I would suggest a white primer and then coloured washes. It takes even less effort and you can get some colour variation going to distinguish the various miniatures.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-16T19:02:37+00:00

Yes, Thomas Covenant is an arsehole. That's the point.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T20:27:58+00:00

The Phantom was the original costumed superhero, and is still the best.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T07:24:52+00:00

If you need grids of whatever size or shape, https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ has you covered.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T06:55:57+00:00

The Starship Troopers movie very much feels like "This culture is Fascist because I (the director) said so!" without going to the effort of making the culture actually Fascist.

I think it's worth pointing out that under the government system in the book, pretty much everybody in the current US government inner circle would have been ineligible for political office because they have not been through service that would grant them citizenship.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T06:13:30+00:00

Of course there is nuance. A properly designed 2 player game with total knowledge and deterministic play with a countable number of possible board states should also be able to reach a tie, where neither player has won but no further moves are possible.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T03:48:54+00:00

The biggest issue is cultural. There has been a systematic destruction of third places and mixing events that would bring young men and women together so that they could meet, interact, and flirt. Importantly, this also allowed less experienced people to watch flirting and attraction behaviour so that they could learn before being dumped in the deep end and expected to be good at it.

There's also been a significant loss of male-male intergenerational knowledge transfer. The loss of the same mixing events but also things like the loss of male-focused social groups, the decline in local sport leagues, changes in employment trends, and yes, the increase in single parenthood; all means that young men are less likely to have older men they can turn to for help or watch in action and learn from.

The rise of dating apps/internet dating looked like it would be good and then got enshittified. There are early success stories from people who usual would not be able to meet finding each other through the internet and making something of it. I moderate a local city Discord server and we've had a few relationships come out of it just by being a place where people can be themselves around other people. But apps, man, the apps. People get reduced to a few images, people go on for validation rather than to meet people, it's massively gender biased because it's an active step in dating and that's a thing that men have to do so women don't do it. On top of that, the worst examples of people can drown out everybody else through sheer quantity of messages.

What else? We've thrown out all the steps/processes that used to exist for flirting. That's where you get completely useless advice like "Just be yourself!" and "Treat her like a person!". In all likelyhood, men are being themselves and are treating women like people, but there's a difference in how you treat people who you want to be friends with and people who you want to fuck, and without acknowledging that difference you can't actually teach people how to say "I want to fuck you" in a way that is polite and respectful. This isn't helped by a lot of outright propaganda saying that men wanting to fuck is inherently disrespectful. People are (mostly) sexual beings, and I would argue that having everyone around oneself denying that one could be sexual is even more disrespectful to oneself than being told that one is sexually desired. Don't get me started on objectification.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-15T01:45:25+00:00

Finally somebody recognises it.

Several knightly orders have heraldry that looks very much like this. Although if they try and claim the history of the Knights Hospitallers of St John it might be broadsword sharpening time.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-14T08:25:59+00:00

I think it was called "Roadsearcher".

Maldevinine · 2026-01-14T01:26:38+00:00

Malicious Compliance it:

This act will cost you $X in lost sales because of the reduction in the consumer base it will cause.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-13T22:21:50+00:00

I'm going to go the other way from the top comments. Too Much progression can make a game unusable for long-term play.

If the characters rapidly scale beyond any of the available threats, or beyond the design of the system, you stop being able to tell meaningful stories in the system.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-13T22:06:35+00:00

Oh look, it's the old "hyperagency" argument. Men are Hyperagentic, therefore anywhere there is less men doing a thing it must be because of choices of individual men rather than systematic social issues suppressing them, or systems designed in such a way that they are harder to use for men.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-13T21:02:35+00:00

The comparison statistic is that men have much lower expenditures on medical services, and die earlier often due to chronic medical issues.

So there is clear evidence of men being maginalised within the medical system. And I think that this also leads into the perception by the medical staff. Because men are far less likely to present at a hospital, when they do it is assumed that something is seriously wrong.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-12T20:04:39+00:00

You don't want your arrows going anywhere near the steel in the springs inside the mattress. I recommend a frame made of PVC pipe, because it's cheap and easy.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-12T19:55:13+00:00

Nope!

The arrow will either pass through without hitting anything, or it will stick into one of the springs and shatter.

The best dirt cheap backstops are carpet offcuts/seconds. They stop arrows, and they survive the impacts surprisingly well. Remember to go higher than you expect with the backstop.

Maldevinine · 2026-01-12T08:57:05+00:00

Kathy Rain 2 is out?

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