okay, this is my other pet hypothesis about AoE4 development. The initial release was kinda buggy and barebones. A year later we get the ‘free anniversary update’ which includes the Ottomans and Malians. Awesome! Free stuff! Goodwill is won amongst the fans! The Sultans Ascend comes out a year later, and we get:

the Ayyubids. Perfectly on-brand.

the Byzantines and the Order of the Dragon. Fair enough, if you’re going to focus on the west Asian sultanates, you can include their opponents.

Jeanne d’Arc and Zhu Xi? Well, it was their first expansion, they were trying some new stuff

The Japanese? Look I’m not gonna say no to more content but I for one have never heard of the sultanate of Japan.

It’s an odd list, given the title, isn’t it? It almost seems like *this* was where they had originally planned to release the Ottomans and the Malians - you know, the actual historically-Muslim empires that come to mind when I think of sultans ascending - but they had to push stuff out of the door early to get some goodwill back and their schedule has been thrown off ever since. Especially since the next major expansion was Dynasties of the east - you know, the perfect place to debut Japan and Zhu Xi’s Legacy. And that’s why all of the major expansions have felt so weird: it’s all been out of sync due to 1. those early civs being pushed out ahead of schedule for the ‘anniversary update’ and 2. higher-ups using ‘variant civs’ to fill in the gaps more cheaply.

that is not a dumb question at all because 'starcraft problem' is something I coined in this post and not, like, an established term or anything.

Anyway, in most genres there's been a long, slow process of evolution and refinement: not just people trying out different things within the genre but developers gaining more experience and learning lessons from past releases, technology improving and allowing for more complex mechanics. Y'know, Growth. But for that to happen you need different releases from different publishers competing within the genre. In the late nineties, you had that: you had Warcraft as the standard-setter, Age of Empires as the one with a more complex economy and more 'symmetric' factions with smaller differences, and Command and Conquer as the one that had Evil Soviet Tim Curry shouting "SPAAAACE!"

Then Starcraft came out (or rather, the Brood War expansion) and swallowed up the whole genre like a black hole. Starcraft could not be dethroned. When Age of Empires 3 came out it was a multimillion-selling award-winning game-of-the-year material and it didn't even scratch Starcraft's paint job. When Starcraft 2 finally came out, we learned that even Starcraft couldn't beat Starcraft.

Which is kind of a problem for the genre, not just for the obvious reasons but also because Starcraft is... not the best game to set the template for the RTS genre. Much of its depth comes from late-nineties jank and using minor bugs to your advantage and all sorts of other esoteric things that are hard to learn, and so the RTS genre gained a reputation for having a really high barrier to entry, the whole "don't bother playing if you don't have 400 APM and haven't memorized several novels of Secret Tech" stereotype.

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

That’s why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

A simple dress or robe that covers an adult from shoulders to mid-calf will usually take about two yards of fabric.

I have avoided Inkhaven meta so far but now it's the last day and I feel like it.

If you're a longtime Spore enjoyer like myself, I'm sure you've seen these videos or others like them, where invisible limbs (either with vanilla glitches or from the Dark Injection mod) are utilized to make creatures that float above the ground, giving them the illusion that they're flying (or swimming).

But the most well-known, "tried and true" method has always felt a bit...

... janky.

This is achieved by attaching a single invisible limb to the front of the creature, which causes it to walk by hopping on that invisible leg. The single-legged walk cycle gives the appearance that the creature is flapping itself up and down, either flying with its wings or swimming by propelling its tail. The length and angle of the leg changes the stride, and in turn changes the speed of the "flight".

However, I'm not satisfied with my dragon being so floppy. It might work fine for some creatures, but the exaggerated animation is simply too exaggerated for my tastes.

So I've done some experimenting. The method I came up with a couple years ago isn't too different, but it has three feet instead of one.

This smoother motion is definitely an improvement, and it's what I use for most of my floaty creatures. Yet, I still wasn't satisfied with this dragon's flight. The tail still feels a bit too floppy, and it looks like it's leading with its chest rather than flying with its wings, as if it's being dragged along by something.

This design proved to be a winner! The wings look more like they're providing powered flight, and the floppiness level of the rear is more appropriate. The legs are a bit cumbersome, but since they're invisible limbs, they won't render when the creature is encountered in-game.

But as I was composing this post, I thought to myself...

can I make the wings truly flap?

The answer is yes, it can be done!

With another pair of invisible legs attached at the elbow joint of the wings, each with three feet, this dragon has truly taken flight! It certainly isn't perfect, but considering the capabilities and limits of Spore, I'd say it's pretty damn good.

The limb that creates the wing, the one which these new invisible legs are attached to, isn't just cosmetic--it's a fully functional wing limb from the Unshackled mod (check out my review of the mod here!). The wing limb provides the creature with the glide ability, complete with animation. Miraculously, even with these invisible legs attached, the wing limb animates exactly as it should. I really did not expect that.

Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, first published over two hundreds years ago, is notoriously considered one of the most difficult-to-play piano pieces of all time.

In particular, when Beethoven sent it to his publisher in 1818, he allegedly said, “Now you have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years hence!”, and much has been made of the fact that it wasn’t publicly performed in its entirety until eighteen years later, by Franz Liszt himself.

Except that’s a bit of a deceptive statistic. See, when Beethoven published Hammerklavier, public solo piano recitals/concerts weren’t really a thing yet. Symphonies, sure; concertos, definitely. But sonatas were “parlor” music—a thing played by amateurs, often skilled amateurs, but amateurs nonetheless, in little sitting-rooms for a bit of entertainment after dinner, or at private salons with a guest list in the low dozens. (And mostly they were meant to be sight-read! The culture of obsessively polishing a piece to make it “performance-ready” wasn’t as much of a thing, back then.) People bought these things the way they bought novels, and, just as someone might buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses today and enjoy puzzling over the thing, even if they never read the whole thing or feel like they fully “get” it, well… some folks would enjoy sonatas the same way.

So yeah, Hammerklavier didn’t have its first public performance until Liszt played it in the Salle Érard. But also, Liszt basically invented the format of “star virtuoso pianist hogging the stage for two hours” in order to get a public audience at all.

But in the meantime—I think about how wonderful it must’ve been, tooling around on the piano during that 18-year-span where there was no evidence that thing even was playable, or that, if playable, that the thing even made sense. Beethoven was nearly totally deaf by this point, after all, a fact that was publicly known—had he totally lost it? people had to wonder. And the only way to find out would be… well, trying it out yourself!

It has the sound of a gimmick. And I’ll bet it was, at least a little bit—but just because something’s more interesting to play than listen to doesn’t mean it’s failing in its goal. (Though fwiw it is very interesting to listen to.)

It also has the sound of, like, Dark Souls, to be honest. Proto-video game culture. A new game drops and people are asking each other: can anyone beat this boss? can you beat this boss? do you still consider your time on the game well-spent even if you never 100% it?

Biographies generally agree that Beethoven’s metronome markings (which only appear in his later work, and only *some* of his later work) are preposterous—often borderline-unplayable, and certainly not very musical. I couldn’t find a recording of anyone trying to play Hammerklavier at the marked 138bpm tempo, so I got a computer to do it—and burst out laughing at the result because, yeah, 138bpm is fucking NUTS. But whether intentional or accidental, I love the audacity of its being there, like a taunt: I dare you to do more. I dare you to do better. I dare you to try.

Much has been made of how difficulty’s a way of keeping people out—but it’s also a way of inviting people in, I think. It says: do this hard thing and you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in the trying. Because the trying is the thing that makes the music live; there is no music without you.

Here’s an old bit from an interview with the game designer Porpentine:

“The purpose of a puzzle [in a game] is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”

Now, in-universe those lines are being said by the anthropomorphic personification of Death, who regularly moves the souls of humans to the afterlife, so the difference between abstractions and concrete things is a little shakier.

so i think "learn what 'socially constructed' means" misses both the diegetic and extradiegetic significance of this passage, which is not just straightforwardly tacking a moral lesson onto the rest of the novel (something pratchett generally does not do!). it's a character moment about Death, and about Susan (who is contesting the characterization of these concepts as "lies"), and it invites the reader to consider why despite the lack of a truth or justice particle we care about such concepts--in good Shklovskian fashion, the word "lie" arrests our attention and forces us to confront the nature of abstract ideas like this, where simply supplying a piece of standard jargon like "socially constructed" would not.

I think Pratchett the author means this as a moral about needing to believe in the little lies like Santa Claus (The Hogfather), because the whole book was about how important believing in Santa Claus is. There's a bunch of scenes of people getting Hogswatch presents and having hope instead of dying in a ditch. It's very on theme for the rest of the book!

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

These are guys who walk around thinking it's a major economic crisis that schoolteachers and bus drivers are overpaid. Compared to what? A Bay Area programmer who pulls $500K a year making Google's products slightly worse every update? That's what they think the pinnacle of productive labor is? Christ.

(The place where you can clearly see actual Laffer dynamics in real life are on vice taxes. We've raised cigarette taxes much higher than the point of optimal revenue—which is fine, because the point was to get people to stop smoking. Similarly, a lot of carbon tax proposals are aiming for a rate higher than the revenue-maximizing rate.)

But to focus on the listed examples briefly, the problem isn't that teachers are "paid too much"; it's that technology hasn't made them (much) more efficient, so we can't get the same amount of "teaching" out of fewer teachers. And part of this is accidental/pragmatic, in that ed tech so far hasn't really worked.

But also part of it is definition, insofar as there's a daycare aspect. If you demand one teacher per thirty students for six hours each day, no technology can enable you to use fewer teachers.

But there's always the idea that our universe is the default, you know. It's never "Yeah. I met my alternate self and she was a squid, almost all other universes are squid people, were the weird primate universe."

A "we're the odd ones" scenario for that might be that if we could look at a bunch of parallel universe versions of the Milky Way galaxy we'd find that in most of them the Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox. In most of them the galaxy was peopled by the first generation of sapient species to evolve six billion years ago. Compared to both our parallel universe contemporaries (who live in a six billion year old super-civilization that would be very obvious to us by now if it was around us; we'd see the Dyson spheres and artificially managed giant stars and so on), and our parallel universe equivalents (who lived six billion years ago and whose alien life discourse is more like "given plausible assumptions about cosmic heavy element accumulation, terrestrial planet formation, evolution, etc., we are living about when we'd expect the first technological civilizations to develop in our galaxy"), we're having this very strange and eerie experience of being in an old but apparently inexplicably empty galaxy. And it would be more than a little ominous to know that our experience is an outlier this way; that suggests that the apparent emptiness of our galaxy isn't a consequence of some natural default feature of the universe, that it's contingent on some low-probability historical event, and one obvious possibility for how our galaxy can be empty in a way that's contingent on some low-probability historical event is that something with first mover advantage has spent the last six billion years destroying new technological civilizations as they develop.

Like, I think "Finding Nemo" is a great film. And people will say, "It's not JUST a film about cartoon fish! It's also about parent-child relationships and suffocating overprotectiveness and learning to let your child be independent!" Which is true. I think that's a very true statement. That IS the emotional core of the movie.

But I also think "Finding Nemo" is great and works as a film because it also respects and explores the setting in a straightforward way. It's also a movie about how genuinely scary it would be to be a small fish in a big, wonderous, terrifying ocean. It's asking, "What would it be like to be a fish going through this experience?"

The original world of "Toy Story" is compelling and delightfully disturbing, because it's asking, "What would it be like to be a toy?" And "A Bug's Life" is similarly asking, "What might it be like to be a bug?" And "Monsters Inc." is asking, "Why might monsters scare children at night?" All of these movies have strong emotional cores and allegories and all that jazz, but they're also engaging with these speculative prompts in a forthright way.

I'm reminded of a joke post that I saw about "The Hobbit" in which Bilbo says, "Ohhh, I get it! The dragon is a metaphor for greed!" And Thorin replies, "Bilbo, it's a real dragon and it's in my house." Like, there IS a lot about Smaug that's neat thematically, for sure, but also... for the fantasy setting to work, you do have to keep in mind the dangerous, logistical realities of a big, fire-breathing, man-eating lizard, which Tolkien obviously very much does.

Like, I saw "Elemental" and I kind of thought... the movie was maybe too caught up in being a metaphor for interracial relationships, possibly at the expense of the speculative worldbuilding. I don't think the movie engaged enough with the fact that marginalized fire-person Ember lives in a city full of water features that could apparently injure or even kill her. I think that the movie pulled a lot of its punches in regards to structural racism.

I thought that "Onward" was particularly disinterested in its own setting and the logic of it. Most of the fantasy elements were gags. It's a "normal" generic modern setting with speculative elements pasted on top, rather than a new world with the speculative elements integrated in unique ways that changed the way that people did things, you know? A society disregarding clearly very powerful magic (and all magical history) in favour of mildly more convenient lightbulbs doesn't actually make sense in-universe. It's, idk, the story forcibly simplifying itself just to call modern society lazy and incurious, which isn't an interesting statement.

I don't remember "Luca" and "Soul" very well, so I won't really comment on them here. I liked "Turning Red" well enough and I think its specific Chinese-Canadian setting worked fine for it. And I think "Inside Out" generally works as well, because it's specifically about how messy it inwardly feels to be even a "normal" preteen / teenage girl; a lot is smoothed over by it all being inside Riley's head. "Lightyear" was... I don't know how to get started on that mess, so I will not start.

The Twilight Zone, 1963, dir. David Lowell Rich