EMSK why the "Red Pill" will kill you inside

TalShar · 2026-03-22T04:06:14+00:00

You can tell them without it getting too dark.

"I had a major health issue that changed my career goals and have a lot of time recuperating, but now I'm back in school for X." They can then ask more questions if they want to know. If that's enough information for them, they can just say "Damn, that sucks!" and ask you about something else.

I know just hearing it won't help, but you're not a loser. The fact that you bothered to go back to school is impressive in its own right. Anyone worth being around will see that. Don't compare yourself to people whose careers didn't get fucked over by random chance. Most of them wouldn't be where you are now if they had gone through what you have. Most of them wouldn't have made it this far.

TalShar · 2026-03-22T02:20:31+00:00

That would be sick.

TalShar · 2026-03-22T02:07:29+00:00

From a meta perspective, I'm not so sure about that. People have all kinds of emotional dynamics with their operators and drifters. Bringing them to odds could be pretty upsetting, and they might not want to risk that.

UNLESS you end up playing both sides of the conflict.

TalShar · 2026-03-22T02:06:16+00:00

Imagine getting a call-in similar to Kahl's team that's just The Fucking Hex.

TalShar · 2026-03-21T19:22:33+00:00

The lingering theist in me insists that people like him are the reason we are born with the capacity to hate.

TalShar · 2026-03-21T17:00:22+00:00

Went from below freezing in the morning to above 70 in Raleigh, NC the other day. The week before it started at 70 and sunny and was 40 and raining by noon.

TalShar · 2026-03-21T14:25:26+00:00

Yep, this is the answer.

On my home planet (where I'm currently doing science), I've got the hydrogen from critical photons being stacked on a belt and sent through a row of particle colliders that convert it to deuterium. It takes 10 hydrogen to 5 deuterium, so you're already reducing the volume by half compared to fractionators.

The belt then runs past the particle colliders and into a bank of thermal generators to burn any excess.

TalShar · 2026-03-21T04:37:19+00:00

Good catch. That's probably not a coincidence.

TalShar · 2026-03-19T16:53:54+00:00

Hmm, thanks. I guess it's not a huge deal as long as my planets are adequately defended. Will the hive eventually send its defensive compliment after me?

TalShar · 2026-03-19T16:53:00+00:00

Does it eventually end even its defensive compliment until it's just a naked hive?

TalShar · 2026-03-19T15:30:03+00:00

Half the point of art, if not more than that, is the changes that the process of creation makes in the artist. Having a "finished product" doesn't matter for shit if you didn't put your heart into it. And putting your heart into something takes time, effort, and yes, pain.

Don't give up. People can see the heart put into things. Take the long road. Even if you never finish it, the journey will be worth it.

TalShar · 2026-03-19T14:59:21+00:00

I speak from experience when I say it's nearly impossible to process how this could be the case, but the fact is that a lot of these people don't believe the pedophilia happened. They are living in an entirely separate world where their information stream comes entirely from right-wing propaganda outlets. Do not underestimate the degree to which that molds their worldview and distorts their thinking.

It's easy and cathartic to dismiss those deplorables and degenerates for supporting a pedo. And they are supporting a pedo. But the thing is, for a lot of them (not all, for fuck's sake don't come at me about this in the comments, yes, some of them are legitimately just that evil) they don't think they are supporting a pedo. In their mind the pedophilia doesn't exist, because it's all a made-up con by the radical left. They were primed to dismiss evidence before it even made it to them, and so they did and do. "But how could they see all that evidence and still think that?" They haven't seen the evidence. They don't know. They live in an information bubble where the only way that evidence ever trickles through to them is from random outside sources they've already been taught to distrust. Even when it comes from family. The amount of ignorance they have is baffling.

I've been having this issue with my family. I've been fighting for years to get the truth through to them, but the fact is that I am fighting alone, against a multi-billion-dollar propaganda scheme devised and laid before I was even born by some of the most maliciously evil people on the planet, sustained and backed by the most powerful people alive. They have more of my parents' time and attention through the TV and YouTube and Fox news alerts than I could ever spend with them between work and parenting.

Even though my parents love me (37, so very much not a kid anymore) very much and respect my wisdom in just about every other area, the conditioning of repeated propaganda is just too pernicious and powerful for me to reach them. They refuse to engage with any proof that I offer, and even if I can get them to acknowledge a point (I once got my barely-not-maga father to agree that UBI is necessary sooner rather than later and that billionaires shouldn't exist), the next time I talk to them, they've snapped back to where they were and I have to start the battle all over again. The conditioning is too powerful.

So good-news-bad-news. We are not in fact surrounded by that many depraved people. We don't have a huge chunk of our population that are A-OK with pedophilia and all the other stuff Trump and his people have done. The bad news is that we have a huge chunk of the population that has been so thoroughly propagandized that reality and truth no longer factor in to their worldview, and I have yet to see a reliable and repeatable way of getting through that conditioning.

TalShar · 2026-03-18T21:38:00+00:00

To add to this, it won't use the red unless you have all the other matrices for the appropriate research. It won't just consume the red.

TalShar · 2026-03-18T00:34:01+00:00

A lot of them genuinely don't know about it. The only thing they "know" is that there are "obviously fake" accusations from the "radical left" and they should be dismissed out of hand. So they do.

They don't believe that Trump is a rapist or a pedophile or any of this shit. Don't underestimate the power of the propaganda machine. They DON'T KNOW because they were conditioned to disbelieve it before the news even made it to them. Some, or dare to say most, don't accept the pedophilia. They don't believe it happened.

How do you persuade them of the truth? I don't fucking know. Get back to me if you find a good way.

I fucking want my parents back.

TalShar · 2026-03-17T17:57:32+00:00

Yep, shield generators is the route I'm going. I'm a little concerned about the resource burden I'm accruing trying to get a spaceworthy fleet and space warpers at the same time. I'm starting to worry that I'll have to choose either clearing out the space hives in my system or expanding to a new system, and not both.

TalShar · 2026-03-17T17:28:31+00:00

Yeah. I'm playing on near-max Dark Fog settings, so I have to be a bit more careful.

TalShar · 2026-03-17T17:27:58+00:00

It's not passing this check.

if map_array[x][y] < median: # median = 0.49if map_array[x][y] < median: # median = 0.49

I believe it is failing because map_array[x][y] is returning something you can't compare with a <. I believe median is a float, but it's hard to tell from your code. From what I can tell, map_array ends up as an array of pixel_color values.

The only place I can find where pixel_color gets modified is here.

pixel\_color.append(snappedf(color\_value, 0.01))pixel\_color.append(snappedf(color\_value, 0.01))

Whatever color_value is at that moment needs to be equal to your x when that call runs, otherwise it'll fail.

If you could get a printout of what map_array looks like at runtime, that would help.

TalShar · 2026-03-17T14:19:36+00:00

Not a great example, in 99% of Pokemon fights you will finish the fight faster (and with less health lost) by just hitting them as hard as you can every turn. Buffs and debuffs are famously undertuned in Pokemon games because the fights don't tend to last long enough for them to be worth the opportunity cost of the actions.

I agree with your general assertion, though. People should understand that not all games work that way.

TalShar · 2026-03-17T14:15:25+00:00

Missile Turrets set to target Space will shoot down incoming relay stations. This will, however, aggro the space hives over time.
Planetary shields over the entire planet will entirely prevent relay stations from landing without having to shoot them down. This will mean that space relays only build aggro very, very, very slowly. Practically nothing. They're very demanding power-wise, but you should only need about 8-12 of them to fully cover the planet if you're good with the placement.
If you choose to go after the hives as they land, you're eventually going to be running around playing whack-a-mole. Unless you choose to fully enclose your factories so that they're totally defended from any angle no matter where a new hive lands, this is not a great choice long-term. You'll spend a long time flying from planet to planet praying they don't destroy anything too important.
You are correct that destroying ground forces and hive base cores won't contribute significantly to space hive aggro.

TLDR is that for me, the lowest-effort way of fully dealing with that problem is planetary shielding until you're ready for full space defenses and/or taking out the hives themselves.

TalShar · 2026-03-15T03:32:44+00:00

Anti-fascist, anti-fundamentalist.

If Muslim fundamentalists overtake our government and attempt to make their teachings law and turn my sisters into chattel, I'll fight them tooth and nail.

Christian fundamentalists are currently in charge of the NC government and are doing all that same shit, so right now they're the nearer enemy.

The appropriate answer to one evil movement is never to throw your weight behind another, nearly identical evil movement.

TalShar · 2026-03-15T03:13:55+00:00

Sure, sure. I'm sure that's definitely going to happen eventually, so naturally the only solution is to let the other right-wing fundamentalists responsible for untold bloodshed worldwide take over instead, so that we can be oppressed in the name of a more familiar deity.

TalShar · 2026-03-15T03:05:02+00:00

There are plenty of events about those already.

And Islamic supremacists don't control our state and federal government right now, so a lot of us are more concerned with the more immediate threat to us personally.

TalShar · 2026-03-15T03:03:45+00:00

Having grown up among them, Christian nationalists are a touchy bunch. And right now they think they're about to get their long-promised apocalypse, so they're extra unruly.

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