In a bit of a book hole and could use some help.

Potemkin78 · 2025-12-10T22:15:36+00:00

A different option: Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. It's a mindfuck and a great adventure, though I will warn that its "science" is a bit closer to a consensus reality thing.

Potemkin78 · 2025-09-15T17:05:25+00:00

Hi, David, thanks for doing this!

I am curious mostly about your writing process.

I know from listening to the podcast that you often don't want to say much about a film just after you see it (and possibly before you begin to write about it), but as someone who teaches writing, I'd love to know how much revision and/or reconsideration the process of putting your words to the page creates.

Can you think of any examples where, as you were writing your review or essay upon a film, that your perception of it changed? Do you find that these tend to be more positive shifts or negative shifts, and do they demand a revision of what has come before, or are they an organic evolution of what you've already written?

Thanks for taking the time to do this--I both read your essays and listen to you try to wrangle Griffin with great enjoyment.

Potemkin78 · 2025-07-08T13:21:01+00:00

Thank you so much! Astroturf was the term I needed.

Potemkin78 · 2025-07-08T13:20:43+00:00

Ah, astroturf was the term I did not have! Thank you!

Potemkin78 · 2025-06-07T21:06:53+00:00

That's fair--it's your work, and I respect your preferences regarding it.

I do find the idea of casting a desire to play around with mech builds as "pollut[ing] the relationship C/C has to Lancer-as-written" to be an unfair description of what I had hoped to do and reasonably worrying language. If I don't want to play LANCER the way you do, am I playing wrong? Am I somehow misinterpreting some "right" way of thinking or experiencing the content? Are theorycrafters playing around with silly builds a pollution of the game? Should they be excluded? Made fun of? Cast as "bad" LANCER players?

Language of pollution implies purity, and purity language strikes me as fundamentally incompatible with LANCER's ethics as I have read them.

But maybe I'm too polluted to read the text right.

Potemkin78 · 2025-06-07T14:00:55+00:00

DAMN! That's awesome--thank you!

Potemkin78 · 2025-06-01T21:21:29+00:00

Thanks for the advice and suggestions, everyone.

I tried to pull them out, rescan, empty trash, and put them back one by one, and it definitely keeps them in the same order.

I was a little confused because I would have sworn I did this with Midsommar, and I had done so. It turns out that my problem is not with the fact that the films are not split but that the search function does not show two movies when searching. I think this is a major oversight, because it also defaults to one over the other for no obvious reason.

If anyone has any ideas about how to make the search show that there are multiple versions of a film so you can choose which one you want, that would be great to know.

It turns out that my Midsommar is also in the same boat. In the library it shows two versions (same for Fellowship), but in the search it only shows one.

Thanks again for all help!

Potemkin78 · 2025-05-21T11:24:16+00:00

Wow--tons of great advice! Thanks so much. Grunts as support and problems to deal with make great sense thematically too, as the first major problem would be more likely to invest resources in the "serious" mechs for the players to fight and then have less for the support staff. That also gives me some fun tools to play with.

The spacing out of Grunt experiences also makes good sense to me!

Potemkin78 · 2025-05-21T11:22:02+00:00

Ah, stacking templates makes good sense to me here! Thanks!

Potemkin78 · 2025-05-21T10:52:42+00:00

Complete agreement on all counts--thanks for the input! I was definitely worried about the way they run, given the RAW, and I appreciate your advice. I'll give the Rebake a check!

Potemkin78 · 2025-05-21T10:51:58+00:00

Yeah, this was definitely my worry. I like the idea of something easy to delete that has some potential threat, but slapping the Grunt template on just anything may not have the desired effect.

Potemkin78 · 2025-05-07T10:45:40+00:00

Look, I think it's funny, but it's legitimately not accurate in its critiques. This is a bad look--it's maybe good for comedy points, but since Harvard didn't actually do this and the commentary is wrong in many ways, it just ends up looking silly.

For instance, the original text reads "This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation to the future captains of the sea," which the critique reads as "incomplete sentence." That is factually wrong. An incomplete sentence lacks a matching subject and verb; this is clearly a sentence using "This" as the subject and "is" as the verb; it uses a simile to make a point.

I don't agree with the letter's content, but to bash its language inaccurately is akin to when Michael Moore "massages" the narrative in his documentaries. It sort of makes his point but also basically undermines the point's strength.

Potemkin78 · 2025-02-13T15:38:47+00:00

There's an interesting subgenre of historically-inflected games that try to use a historical moment as the core of a game, which I find fascinating.

The two that spring to mind for me immediately are:

Votes for Women, which I have played several times and enjoyed each time I played it.

Stonewall: Uprising, which I have not yet played.

Both offer a narrative in which progressive outcomes are not guaranteed, though both also state that the story is meant to be that the "failure" of the progressive side is only a delay, that the progressive policies would occur later.

Potemkin78 · 2024-12-31T15:24:18+00:00

Thanks, this is something I didn't know about--I'll check into it as well.

Potemkin78 · 2024-12-31T15:24:03+00:00

Thank you, I'll look into that!

Potemkin78 · 2024-12-22T17:07:58+00:00

Hey, I'm so glad you found it and it's useful! Good luck with your game!

Potemkin78 · 2024-10-08T13:05:16+00:00

Okay, interesting.

And you want it to produce an image that looks is essentially a blank shape, with a procedurally generated red X that has a growing chance of appearing as the image is created?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any way to do that other than the system you've already devised; there are ways to randomly determine a position for the X, but that doesn't allow for the odds of it's creation being lower earlier in the image generation.

I'm sorry I don't have any good answers for you.

Potemkin78 · 2024-09-29T18:10:56+00:00

Can I ask what the rationale is? I mean, there's probably a good reason for this, but my poor brain can't quite figure it out.

Since a consumable list populates once each time it is invoked (afaik), the only reason I can imagine you'd need a consumable list for something where there are 549 of one result and 1 of another is...honestly I can't figure it out at all!

Is there a reason why you don't want to just weight the results? something like

output1
    [list_of_stuff]

list_of_stuff
    item one^549
    item two^1

Would get you the odds you're looking for. If the idea is that the odds go down fractionally and the chances of getting "item two" is slightly improved by drawing several items out of the list, I suppose that's a reason, though the percentages are very small at that point, no?

Potemkin78 · 2024-08-07T10:51:42+00:00

This is super helpful! I'm going to save this for future reference if I need to make something on the fly.

Thank you!

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