Messages

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

« on: Today at 12:34:08 PM »

I was surprised too - I was certainly expecting later in the year. I wonder if this is a doctrine on Sunak's part of of "good politicians make surprise moves that outwit their enemies. This is a surprise move, therefore it will outwit my enemies, because I am a good politician." Or possibly he's got a job offer in California and they want him to start in August.

Honestly it feels like the most vapid campaign start I can remember from all sides. I'm by any reasonable standards an enormous politics nerd and I really don't know what the opposition is offering except "change" or what the incumbents are claiming they've achieved. I don't even know what my own party is promising that's meaningful and distinct. The whole thing feels like a weird vacuum where everyone is going "eh, it's the other lot's turn now I guess".

Is that just a me thing watching from abroad and people back in the UK are more fired up for this/have I just become disconnected from what's going on at home? Genuinely interested for thoughts from those back on the ground.

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

« on: Today at 12:12:23 PM »

children

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

« on: May 22, 2024, 09:47:36 PM »

Some European news, as we approach the EU elections (early June):

The Dutch still don't know who's going to be Prime Minister because the obvious candidate has come down in a scandal, also the right-liberal VVD look like being kicked out of the European liberal party for working with the deeply anti-European PVV.

Also, even more darkly amusingly, the Identity and Democracy group in the European parliament, which is to say the most fascist of the formal groups, is blowing itself up on the cusp of the elections because the German fascists are increasingly too obviously Nazi for the French fascists. Being too Nazi for Marine le Pen is not something anyone should ever want to achieve, but turns out it's happened, and it does look like le Pen has actually ruled out sharing a group with the AfD after the election, which in turn will force the other ID parties like Lega, the PVV, the Austrian FPO, etc, to decide which part of the split they go down. Possibly the result is that le Pen goes to the ECR, since she's moved to a much more publicly anti-Russian stance to deflect her own past dealings with them whereas most of the rest of ID is more anti-Ukrainian.

We're also just a week away from South Africa's election: the ANC might just scrape a majority still, they've recovered a tiny bit of ground in the last few polls. The DA look a bit stuck, probably doesn't help that they've got a white leader which may blunt their reaching out to most of the rest of the country. The new MKP have clearly taken a chunk off the ANC based on Jacob Zuma's personal vote, but the radical EFF don't look like they've made much progress either: the ANC aren't being crushed, just losing bits off all sides to different political parties.

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

« on: May 22, 2024, 10:26:04 AM »

model

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

« on: May 22, 2024, 09:32:41 AM »

Sample

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

« on: May 21, 2024, 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.

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

« on: May 21, 2024, 09:41:31 AM »

Ooh, do let us know how that goes though!

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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.

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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.

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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

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

« on: May 17, 2024, 08:56:34 AM »

burner