Bay 12 Games Forum

Wouldn't that all be up to you? It's a fictional critter. There's precedent in biology for multiple stomachs if that helps - maybe the human part digests things and the horse part handles cellulose? It must still suck chewing grass with human teeth, so maybe they have bigger molars and stronger jaws? A horse needs big lungs to gallop, and they also have bigger heads and mouths to take in more air - maybe the human part has a giant gawping mouth to compensate for all of this? And what if, instead of a stomach, there's a horse brain inside the human torso, and they talk?

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Economics doesn't account for everything here, it's certainly not the reason we don't just put people in shackles

Economics wise slavery is a very poor business model and is one of the major reasons why the USA ended slavery.

For all its guff... The North was more inclined to abolish after it no longer strongly benefited from it anymore. Which kind of throws a curve ball into their moral superiority stance on the civil war.

Yeah, but for a long time because of the growth represented by expanding trade, it was great for the people that had them. There were economic forces involved, but on an individual level, it's crazy to discount empathy when we could potentially just be treating people like cattle with hands and just wasting that much more out of pure laziness for an alternative. In a lot of ways we still do through our prisons and third-world labor. That's changing because people are pointing it out and fighting to make their conditions better, and yes, because it's unsustainable.

For recorded media, we have a problem of infinite growth. There appears to be no reason other than empathy to stop exploiting creatives, so I'm giving you a reason - if you don't support us, we will disappear. That sounds like apocalyptic posturing even to me, but consider that most musicians are completely unknown to you when you buy an album. There are dozens if not hundreds of songwriters, producers, audio engineers, and (though I'm ironically loathe to include them) people in distribution and marketing putting that album in your hands. When you get that album from a Youtube stream, you're paying a fraction of a penny to all of those people, probably only once. This beast is only going to get bigger until the bubble pops, and we're left with only folk. I mean that could be a good thing in some ways, but that doesn't make it any less of a loss of knowledge and skill, and it's completely unnecessary if we just gave way to more lower tiers for artists to occupy. It's completely up to us how we value these works.

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The reason mods are an "inferior" product, something with less work and less value, is that we don't pay for mods.

An inferior product is a cheaper alternative to an existing product that is typically of lower quality or expectantly... even if it isn't so.

Off brand Katchup, even if it is 100 times tastier then brand katchup, is an inferior product.

I get that. Would you say that it's impossible, though, for there to be "superior" (or whatever the terminology might be) products that support the work of something that makes much more? Because I would count the components of a game, its art, music, writing, code, etc. as an example from their individual perspectives. I would also count game engines - whether or not they make more money, the cost of producing them can fail to make up for the work and cost of labor put into them.

I can't read all of this thread without getting severely depressed. Suffice it to say, this whole fiasco turned me off of modding completely, and made it harder to stomach working on music. The idea that we should turn back to patronage ("donations") to support the arts completely ignores the problems that this created for the underclass in the renaissance. In fact I would go so far as to say that patronage manufactured the concept of "talent" wholecloth as an excuse to devalue the work of people who simply could not afford to hone their craft to the levels of the "greats."

By and large, electronic music is hypercommercial as a result of the perception that music is cheap to produce, create, and distribute, where the reality is that the thousands of hours musicians put into learning their craft (yes, including electronic musicians, including the dubstep brosephs people love to hate) represents a heavy cost of its own, and the most successful commercial electronic music groups have dozens of ghost producers in their ranks. If I could spend all of my time working on music, I would. I don't want it to be a hobby. I want it to be my life.

That's just not possible, because people think what I do should be free - my family needs my help, financially, so no, I can't even really justify just scraping by for the sake of this. The stereotypical starving artist bullshit would make me a monster. My family would support me, but I have a three year old niece I would be taking food from if I did not work. And why yes, I do suck. Because I can't spend all my time on music, I'm not where I could be in terms of my skill with composition and my level of practice.

At the same time I'm expected to give away my work for free as a "labor of love," I'm scowled at for being an unsuccessful amateur. Amateur, as in someone who does not make money from their work. I looked at making music in collaboration with other Skyrim modders (making a standalone collection for extending the existing themes was the next step) as a possible out when this first bubbled up to my attention. I seriously geared up to approach it as a possible business - I've loved Elder Scrolls since Daggerfall for its music - and pretty much overnight I saw that collapse into a gibbering heap of greed.

Yes, I would call demanding something I make be given to you for free greed. I simply don't buy any of the problems that were brought up as the real reason so many people were screaming about this, because under it all was that "labor of love" thing, and there was literally nothing stopping Bethesda or Valve from fixing the valid problems such as mod theft with moderation up to disabling accounts. I'm at the point where I'm only sharing my new music with my family, because every single distribution service - Soundcloud, Youtube, even Bandcamp - profits greatly from the belligerent apathy of our culture towards music.

I really thought this could open up so much for artists, writers, etc. Choice of Games comes to mind as something where writers can still make money off of their fiction, despite writing being devalued to the point where we expect journalists to work off of royalties. What is so repugnant about music and art that any similar outlet for them is crushed under this double standard?

It might be nice for certain cultures in-game to be more or less interested in geometry, like the ancient greeks, vedic indians, chinese, etc. _because_ of these beasts, then having gods take these sorts of forms for scholars to impress them or to reveal knowledge. There are already tons of mathematics topics available for worldgen and dwarves to write about. Would be especially awesome if this lent itself to some sort of forgotten-beast summoning, world-cracking magic exploiting alien topology, and for people to get suspicious of anything too mathy as a result

• News and youtube comment section punditry. Internet knife fights bring me back to the joyful stupidity of 4am IRC.
• The Walking Dead. I don't even know why anymore, it's probably not embarrassing to the majority of people or it wouldn't be running, but it feels dirty, especially this new season.
• Cheap greasy chinese food, the more MSG the better.
• Gratuitous bullet point lists.
• Wildly nonscientific pontifications about physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Science-fantasy is my genre. Yes, I'm that kind of scumbag nerd.

I'll try again this year, came very close last - 39k words, still picking away at it. Are second drafts of previous NaNo failures ok? I haven't decided on a new story yet, and it'd feel good to finish/improve that one.

They change shape without energy, huh...? So what happens when you make something like cellular automata with them? We know some of the rules are turing-complete...