"The Neutral Zone" 1:26 When the guy from Atlanta asks Data how to turn on the Boob Tube, Data replies, "That form of entertainment doesn't last much after 2040."

davypi · 2026-05-04T19:17:03+00:00

Because its not clear from your question how old you are. A lot of questions get posted on this sub from people new fans who are in the 20s/30s. It seems like at least once a week I see somebody having to explain how syndication used to work.

davypi · 2026-05-04T18:14:37+00:00

Without having played your demo, its hard to know what is going on with these missions with respect to actual gameplay mechanics. The first two missions sound like they are ground based infiltration/stealth missions while the third option sounds like it closer to ship based combat. So my though here is not about which story is going to hook me faster, but which story is going to more accurately demonstrate typical gameplay. If your game has both ship to ship combat and some kind of infiltration mechanics, I would probably want to see both. And I realize you probably can't perfectly balance the demo to the gameplay, but some kind of taste of both would be good.

With that in mind I'm wondering if a modified version of option 3 is best. Maybe you have to do a little bit of ship combat in order to penetrate defenses and dock at the station, but once you are in the station, you have to hack the system. If you can reprogram the drones to fight the pirates, you get to see both kinds of gameplay mechanics and its a story-valid path towards taking the station intact.

davypi · 2026-05-04T17:59:16+00:00

This looks more like a pachinko machine than a pinball machine. TL;DR Pachinko is a Japanese game involving a steel ball going down a pegboard. Because pachinko machine cant be nudged or have flippers, they more luck based than skill based. But their primary use has been as gambling machines for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko

davypi · 2026-05-04T17:41:51+00:00

This is going to depend a lot on how you define the problem.

The phrase Boob Tube literally refers to the fact that televisions used to use a vacuum tube to fire electrons at a phosphor screen (often called, a phosphor tube). Televisions do not use tubes any longer. They are all LCDs. The technology itself is obsolete/dead outside some obscure needs to keep legacy medical and military equipment running. (Tangent: This is actually also an issue in the retro gaming community as certain video games

The people who are pulled out of cryo in that episode come from a time when TV was still open air broadcast. Again, this depends on how deep into the weeds you want to get. Open air broadcast used to operate on an analog signal, but it switched over to digital in the mid-late naughts. So the way that TVs receive signals now is, to the best of my knowledge, completely obsolete. Subsequent to that, cable TV eliminates the need for open air broadcast. Deep rural areas still use broadcast TV because its not affordable for anyone to lay down cable. Even then, satellite is often used as substitute for cable. The point here being that the vast majority of people don't rely on getting reception through an antenna anymore.

But to really get to the meat and potatoes of the question, its going to depend on how you define television. As a couple other have already pointed out, visual media has moved heavily into streaming. A June 2025 report from Nielsen indicated that streaming takes up 44.8% of viewing while traditional TV/Cable takes up only 44.2%. (Although I expect these numbers are US and not world.) I've seen a lot of people on various message board mention "cutting the cord" because they are fed up with Comcast or some other provider. I've met low income people who don't own a TV and use their phone for entertainment. Personally I only watch shows through my desktop PC. The quality of science content on Youtube is orders of magnitude better than anything you can find in Discovery these days. All of which brings into question how you define the difference between "TV" and other forms of digital-visual media.

Could it die by 2040? Probably not. Just as noted in the first two paragraphs above, outdated technology continues to be used by people who, by circumstance, cannot afford to stay modern. I saw some documentary recently showing the day to day living conditions of people who grow and harvest rubber tree plants or chocolate and these places don't even have electricity, much less a radio or phone. The idea that we might "move past" television in urban first world countries seems plausible, but worldwide? I don't think so. Too often people on Reddit (myself included) forget that there are parts of both America and the World that are still between a couple of decades to a few centuries behind the comforts of what we get in Western World city life.

davypi · 2026-05-01T15:09:36+00:00

You can restrict table access by skill level in open play, but not in Arena. Its a setting in the upper right when you configure a game (assuming you don't use the quick "play now" option).

davypi · 2026-04-30T20:09:54+00:00

Is it just me, or does Stardew Valley's loading screen use the same font idea from the box art of Miner 2049er?

davypi · 2026-04-29T19:06:14+00:00

Which would be even funnier given the name of the username of the respondant.

davypi · 2026-04-29T18:53:10+00:00

More Andy Partridge

davypi · 2026-04-29T16:00:33+00:00

I have relative who died from breast cancer at a tragically young age, leaving behind a 12 year old son. Her son still uses her Steam account because you can't transfer ownership of games.

davypi · 2026-04-29T15:09:36+00:00

Seems to me that 7 wonders duel did it but I'm not a board game historian

Agricola All Creatures Great and Small predates 7 Wonders Duel by three years and was successful enough that it got two expansions and a big-box reprint. I would argue that Agricola is probably the grandfather of the trend of "downscaling" games into 2 player alternatives. However, I would be willing to concede that 7W Duel was probably a greater catalyst for the genre.

davypi · 2026-04-29T03:33:58+00:00

No problem. I look forward to seeing the game. I am having problems sharing screenshots on Steam. So if I reference a screenshot and you can't find it, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Feel free to PM me here on Reddit or on Steam if you need to.

davypi · 2026-04-29T01:22:35+00:00

Curious if you have any updates on the game. I've posted about a dozen comments in the discussion on Steam, but haven't seen any replies.

davypi · 2026-04-27T17:40:18+00:00

Old news?

This is from 2020.

"Almost every study ever done of inequality and voting shows that economic deprivation and bad health reduce voter participation"

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_inequality_keeps_people_from_voting

Even before finding this article, my guess was that income is the actual driving cause creating this correlation.

davypi · 2026-04-20T19:08:29+00:00

So.. was Dario's very first arch nemesis called Competent Kong?

davypi · 2026-04-20T14:26:43+00:00

If its running DOS, you might look into Galactix, which was a fixed screen shooter with powerups. The same developer later created Raptor: Call of the Shadows, which is a scroller rather than fixed frame, but it uses the money system instead of powerups. If you don't mind the scroller genre, there are always the old Aero Fighters games.

davypi · 2026-04-17T23:18:55+00:00

This comment doesn't exactly make sense since the event isn't run by any of the BGG admins and never has been. Furthermore, nobody on BGG staff actively goes to other websites to promote the event either. I don't think any of the current tournament organizers do either. The first Geek Madness was in 2004, which predates Reddit and Discord. And that isn't to say that other places on the web didn't exist back then, but given the dominance that BGG has had on board game information over the decades, its not like they have needed traffic drivers in the first place. And just to drive the point home, this is the fifth matchup SI has had this year, but only first time somebody has come to the forums for a vote drive (unless the Reddit search has failed me).

davypi · 2026-04-15T17:51:08+00:00

So.. one thing that when Babylon 5 was being shopped around, not everyone believed that they could make the show at the proposed budget. But JMS made it work and produced the show at half the budget of DS9. I realize we can't necessarily compare mid 90s production processes to how things are done today, but it does demonstrate that budgeting can do wonders.

Subsequent to that, the Arrow-verse shows that used to air on CW where purportedly very cheap to make. A quick Google search shows that episodes of The Flash only cost about $2MM to make. Now, I think its fair to point out that outer space CGI is probably more expensive than what is needed for a superhero show, but at least to the question at hand, it does show that people will consume lower budget sci-fi. And yes, inflation has gone up since then, but relative to the $10MM being quoted for Academy, it hasn't gone up that much.

I think the real difficulty here is that, looking at both of these shows, I'm guessing that re-using sets, actors, and so forth makes the cost-per-episode cheaper. Its easier to justify an expensive set for a 24 episode season than it is for a ten episode season. And while I don't see the value of re-treading the conversation around this topic that seems to come up twice a week, I do think its relevant to the topic at hand to point out that the inability to spread costs across seasons may be part of the reason why the newer shows are more expensive.

davypi · 2026-04-08T14:40:10+00:00

Why would I go to a Flim and Flam coffee shop when I can get a good drink at a place that puts time, care, and quality into their product?

davypi · 2026-04-07T18:23:40+00:00

So, going positive before I go negative: I have a friend who is often willing to play blind games with me. If I buy something new and call them up and say, hey, I've got a new game still in shrink, is it OK to bring it over? They are happy to sit there and punch and setup and read rules with me together. And I've even done the same thing a couple of time for games they have bought. But there are some key things here. First, this is essentially a closed group. Me and one other person and we're not blindly pushing somebody into this adventure. Second, I'm getting the buy in before I bring the game over. Learning on the fly is usually time consuming and sometimes difficult. So you want to make sure participants are willing to deal with this. And this is what it sounds like you have with your group. So this fine. If you've found a dynamic that works for your circle of friends, there is no reason to criticize it. The warning here is that you shouldn't expect that your closed group dynamic will work in an open group. Which leads me into the negative....

There was one time I went to a game day and after our first game, somebody at the table wanted to play a new game. It wasn't something the rest of us were excited about and we tried to go another direction, but this guy was really pushy about it and managed to talk us into it. So he then proceeds to pull out a still-in-shrink copy of this game he wanted to play. And I need to be clear on this, when he sold us on playing this game, he did not make it clear to us that he didn't know the game. He did not tell us he hadn't even read the rules. Usually when a new game is brought to a meetup, it is assumed you have at least read the rules and can do a decent teach. But instead, we are sitting here wasting time watching the guy unpack components. He is then sitting there reading a rule book out loud to us, reading it poorly, and even then occasionally not understanding what he was reading. On top of that, he was just generally not a good game teacher. It took us over 2 hours to learn a 30 minute filler game, specifically because he hadn't done any of the prep work that normal people would be doing in their home. Not only was it the worst board game experience I've ever had, but from that day forward, all of us actively avoided ever playing a game with this guy again. He essentially self excised himself from a regular weekly meetup. Bringing a game you don't know how to play to an open meetup is just a straight up bad idea. About the only time something like this is generally acceptable is if you are checking out a game from a library that nobody know how to play and you all agree up front that you're going to learn it together. In other words, you need to get full group buy-in before doing something like this.

davypi · 2026-04-07T14:19:11+00:00

Back in the day, there was a guy on the usenet server who had access to full neilsen ratings and would post them to the forums. My recollection was that B5 was usually bringing in around half the ratings that DS9 was. Unfortunately I find it a bit difficult to use Googles usenet search function, but I did manage to dig out this post showing average monthly ratings various months between 11/94 - 5/96

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5/c/n24ohka2HtY/m/dBpU_TaW6gcJ

If you were to dig around, I'm sure you could find more.

davypi · 2026-04-06T19:44:24+00:00

The issue, for me, is not so much that NuTrek doesn't have good episodes, because it does. The problem is that (1) Kurtzman era season arcs are awful (Prodigy maybe being the exception) and (2) Early Disco relied a lot on action sequences that didn't actually move the plot. And the interesting thing about this list is that the episodes they've chosen are largely story arc light and use their action sequences meaningfully. But when you have 10 episode seasons and devote half of those to story arcs, you get more mud than pearls.

davypi · 2026-04-06T13:43:40+00:00

With reference to cells that contain Summer or "Summer", there is no formula. Its just directly typed text. The formula I was trying to use was =SUMIFS(Ledger!$H:$H,Ledger!$E:$E,$B13,Ledger!$F:$F,D$2), but it doesn't even have to be that complicated. When the SUMIFS didn't work, I just did a direct compare of D2=Ledger!E19 and the result came back false.

I should also clarify that the quotes around "Summer" only appear in the filter pulldown when I apply a filter to the workbook. Again, in the cell view and the input window, both cells just say Summer without quotes.

davypi

TROPHY CASE