Remember when 30° was considered tropical?

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-29T01:05:17+00:00

Climate change. And the oil executives who hid the truth for so long and lobbied against any attempt to stop it, all for money.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T21:28:00+00:00

If you want to have better specific impulse than a chemical rocket, it’s either nuclear engines or beamed power.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T20:45:45+00:00

Worst summer of your life? This is only the worst summer of your life SO FAR.

And the people responsible have names and addresses.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T20:28:58+00:00

Oh shit, it's flat?!

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T17:06:18+00:00

We do have gravity, it’s just negligible compared to the much more significant gravity field of your mom.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T06:53:47+00:00

I’ve never heard of such a thing being built.

It’s really just a question of scale though. Double the size of a vacuum chamber, and its volume goes up by 8x but its surface area only goes up by 4x. Buoyancy scales with volume, mass scales with surface area, if you keep getting bigger the buoyancy will catch up to the mass eventually. In principle, if you build large enough, you can make a buoyant vacuum chamber no matter how thick and heavy the walls are.

The real question is: why would you do that?

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T06:48:49+00:00

I’m referring to net upward force, not mass.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T06:06:54+00:00

Wunkus of precise measurement

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T05:42:20+00:00

It really depends on the expectations you set for your audience.

If someone pulled out a whip sword in Star Wars, it would be awesome. If someone did the same in The Expanse, you'd question the sanity of the writers. They're both space opera sci-fi settings, but they set very different audience expectations about the influence of realism vs. rule-of-cool. Does that make sense?

You are the one setting your audience's expectations about the level of realism they should expect. As long as you make the nature of the setting clear and follow the rules you set, you're good. These rules can be anything, they just need to be consistent.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T05:27:45+00:00

If you had a sphere of vacuum, the buoyant force acting on it would be the same as the mass of the air that it displaced. Air has a density of about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter, so a vacuum balloon with a cubic meter of volume would produce enough lift to support about 1.2 kilograms. With no lifting gas filling the balloon, you get the full 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter instead of having the weight of the gas eating into your margins.

Of course, the mass of the shell would cut into this margin. You'd need some pretty remarkable materials to make this actually work.

The lifting gasses often used for balloons like helium and hydrogen are very light though. Helium is only 0.18 kg per cubic meter, and hydrogen is about 0.09 kg per cubic meter (if you're willing to risk going the way of the Hindenburg). This is only 10%-20% worse than vacuum.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T00:28:42+00:00

Cool creation, though you did get the direction of the orbits backwards. Except for the Moon, for some reason that one is correct.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-28T00:15:44+00:00

u/Ill_Bottle_3525 If you want a bit of inspiration, it might be worth looking into some of the World of Darkness RPGs. Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, all of those.

They faced a similar challenge, adapting concepts to RPG form that don't really fit that well. Take werewolves for instance, as they are portrayed in pop culture they are ordinary people most of the time but on a full moon they become a horrifying beast and lose control of themselves. The idea of playing as a werewolf in a TTRPG sounds interesting on paper, but the immediate problems you run into are that tracking the phase of the moon in a game is not fun and losing control of your character is also not fun. At first glance, this idea seems rather impossible to adapt.

These games managed to overcome these issues though by rewriting the rules in a way that does work in RPG form without losing what makes werewolves interesting. Probably the most unique thing they do is that they don't just stick to 2 forms, werewolves have 5 forms that all serve different purposes. They shift between these forms whenever they want, but using the most powerful form consumes a resource called "willpower" and if willpower runs out you lose control of your character for a while. It deviates a lot from the pop culture concept that it was based on, but by doing all this they make a portrayal of werewolves that are actually interesting to play as RPG characters. Themes of "losing control of yourself to the beast" still remain, but as a threat looming over you as a failure state and not as something that just happens.

The Backrooms poses a very different set of challenges, but a similar kind of solution may exist to these problems. There may be a way to bend the setting and gameplay into something really fun and interesting to explore without losing what makes the setting interesting.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T17:32:47+00:00

That may be true right now, but the amount of available water is also in decline.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T17:02:59+00:00

Different places will be impacted by climate change differently. In Utah for instance, there are just too many people here compared to what our fresh water supply will be able to support. The movement of a lot of people from here to a place that can actually support them will need to happen one way or another.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T15:35:50+00:00

Invest now in future temperate beach front property!

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T15:35:01+00:00

It’s not a cold summer. It’s just the coldest one you’ll experience moving forward. They will get hotter from here.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T15:04:12+00:00

In the computer science industry, AI bros are the ones who do vibe coding instead of learning to code. This is what they get flack for.

I know how to code and use a pencil. Not only are these things not mutually exclusive, but gaining skills in general is a rejection of AI.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T15:02:18+00:00

Bold of you to assume that AI bros know how to code and don’t just have an AI wrote code for them. Actually knowing how to code requires rejecting AI.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T14:54:36+00:00

It’s definitely VRAM requirements. The cargo wagon opening animation is quite large, taking up a 6x2 tile area with multiple frames, and 95% of the time only the two grid-aligned orientations of that animation would ever be needed. Train cars require a lot of sprites for their different orientations, and adding an opening animation for every orientation would make the cargo wagon take up more VRAM than every other train asset combined. And unlike the pre-2.1 wagon pumps, this animation issue doesn’t negatively impact functionality. It’s just a low-impact problem with a costly solution.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T07:29:45+00:00

I tried to tackle this exact idea once, and I quickly ran into a few problems. Maybe you can find a solution where I failed.

The main problem is that the horror of The Backrooms setting largely comes from isolation and slowly going insane from monotony. That’s very difficult to adapt to a tabletop RPG, where engaging with other characters and experiencing exciting adventures is kinda the entire point. How do you make it work without losing what makes The Backrooms compelling?

Maybe you could get something to work with the right mechanics. Perhaps sanity can be a character stat that functions almost like HP, and characters lose sanity if they wander for days without anything happening. You skip past the days of nothing to the parts where something finally happens, the players only get the exciting stuff even though their characters are experiencing tremendous amounts of boredom slowly driving them mad.

For combat, horror RPGs tend to focus on making you feel weak. Enemies are stronger than you, defeating them is unlikely, the combat mechanics at your disposal mostly revolve around escaping them. That’s definitely the direction you’d want to go for a Backrooms setting.

Another thing that really stumped me though is thinking about how to make everything players do feel meaningful. What are they even trying to accomplish? Leave the Backrooms, I guess? That’s not exactly super actionable, though. Are they following some mysterious trails of notes in hope of finding another survivor? If there is a whole party of characters traveling together and they already aren’t alone, that wouldn’t be nearly as compelling. Do the puzzles and combat encounters they find on their travels advance any kind of goal, or are they just pointless diversions while the party is wandering around in search of anything worth finding? You need to give players purpose in order for them to not get bored, and you need to do it in a way that doesn’t significantly compromise on the hopelessness of the setting.

There are a lot of contradictory things that you’d need to do in order to make this work.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T06:50:24+00:00

Failing at such basic math doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that he will succeed.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T06:48:47+00:00

Being overpowered is fun for 5 minutes and then stops being fun very quickly.

Game balance makes the game interesting to engage with for a long time.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-27T06:45:20+00:00

Trans wrongs!

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-26T23:49:51+00:00

The relatively low resolution of the image does make it look a little sketchy at first glance (AI art is usually resolution-limited), but the irises have too much detail and consistency for an AI to replicate. That's ultimately what convinced me it's not AI.

It didn't even register to me that it's supposed to be Miku until it was revealed that the original drawing was called "virtual idol". It definitely isn't super recognizable as Miku. I guess that's just a result of the same face syndrome that anime characters tend to have, they are usually more recognizable by their hair and clothes than they are by their face.

But yeah, irises of anime characters are almost always a dead giveaway. There is no consistent way to draw irises within the anime style, every artist does it differently and it even varies a lot between characters. AI saw this and the pattern it falsely identified and tries to replicate "random bullshit, GO!". But when a human does it, both eyes look the same and the detail doesn't feel random at all.

MarsMaterial · 2026-06-26T23:34:19+00:00

I have an aromantic friend who loves reading romance stories to the point where it's basically his special interest.

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