Messages

1

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Space yays

« on: Today at 10:05:34 AM »

Ceglowski has posted a long essay in the style of a business or policy paper with his criticisms of the Artemis program. I sure would take a bet that NASA will not land astronauts on the moon by 31 December 2026 but having some manned spaceflight seems better than dropping more bombs on Arabs or tax cuts for billionaires or other things the actually-existing United States would do with the money. https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm  And half a dozen countries or alliances have serious space programs now so if the USA loses interest the rest of us will keep going.

I substantially agree with you, though I'd be more worried for the future of space exploration about things like the critiques he makes of the lander system: having a bunch of astronauts die on the moon after their multi-storey landing capsule fell over feels like the sort of thing that would really tank wider support for space travel.

2

General Chatter - The Boozer / Re: May pub - 30th or 31st?

« on: Today at 09:41:31 AM »

Ooh, do let us know how that goes though!

3

Pangolin Games / Re: Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

« on: May 19, 2024, 11:26:12 PM »

32 achievements now ingame! So that's progress. Here are some more of the latest ones:



I've also started work on the much needed dungeon crawl overhaul: I've been putting in "service" sections for piping more information around the various functions so far, but I've now got to a point where:

• Completing a dungeon turns it into a ruin instead (which could then be redeveloped, so it lets you "clear" the area in your own cities if you'd rather have another amenity).
• Ruins have a chance to turn into dungeon entrances (which is currently set way too high for testing purposes, this will be a very rare event).
• Dungeons have a type, which will set the final enemy, and which I'm also planning to use to flavour some of the miscellaneous events on lower levels.

The next and probably bigger section of the overhaul is to add three new enemies on top of the one already used. I want these to be some of the more interesting/unusual boss fight style encounters in the game, there to stretch its better players, so they're going to involve some difficult/unusual mechanics.

4

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Sex education in the UK - an update

« on: May 19, 2024, 09:45:28 PM »

Teachers take after their worst-behaved students: tell them not to do something and they're possibly more likely to do it. Speaking from experience.

I think that's true in terms of attitudes, but threatening people's jobs can have a certain chilling effect on that sort of thing, and make it harder to get time when it's not on the curriculum: teachers are also in my experience very stretched! It would almost need a level of full civil disobedience to get it to work on a "you can't fire all of us" basis, and I don't know if that's something anyone's quite prepared to organise sadly.

5

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 18, 2024, 07:37:42 PM »

bar

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 18, 2024, 04:25:34 PM »

Line

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 18, 2024, 08:47:37 AM »

Catalogue

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 17, 2024, 10:56:57 AM »

roomba

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 17, 2024, 09:53:32 AM »

drawing

10

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 17, 2024, 08:56:34 AM »

burner

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 17, 2024, 07:52:12 AM »

Box

12

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: World Politics and Elections 2024

« on: May 16, 2024, 08:48:44 PM »

European political news: the headline bit is that Robert Fico, hard-authoritarian prime minister of Slovakia, has narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The trigger seems to have been his attempts to bring state media under closer government control. I've often wondered why more people don't get assassinated in politics: don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be a good thing, but I think one can point to a fair number of prominent cases where it's worked in achieving political goals from the assassin's perspective. I think the main explanation is that senior political actors are much more scared of eroding norms against assassination than they are of, say, going to war, because the latter only involves a bunch of other people getting shot rather than themselves. I do worry that in Slovakia the failed attempt will now be used as a pretext for cracking down on the opposition.

Georgia is in turmoil and with continual protests over its 'foreign agent' law. I'm really personally sad seeing the country becoming more authoritarian: the new legislation adds large invasive monitoring obligations on anyone who recieves significant funding or payments from abroad, and is generally mostly intended as an attack on civil society institutions.

Also the Dutch now have a government! It's not a very good government, and we're still not sure who's going to be prime minister, but the four right-wing parties who were involved in coalition talks now have a coalition agreement, perhaps in large part spurred by polls showing that if the country had another election the far-right PVV would do even better at the expense of their now coalition partners, such that said partners had a strong negotiating incentive. The parties evidently hate each other and there are clearly VVD and NSC members who hate working with the PVV in particular so we'll see how that goes.

13

Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 16, 2024, 05:26:24 PM »

royal

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 16, 2024, 03:30:29 PM »

lecture

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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association

« on: May 16, 2024, 09:10:16 AM »

physics