Bay 12 Games Forum

Half-life Alyx release date: March 2020
Bannerlords early acess: March 2020
Black Mesa 1.0: Within two months
Factorio final: Less than a year, possibly two months

FOUR OF THE FIVE SEALS WILL UNLOCK NIGH THE VERNAL EQUINOX.
ONLY THE 1.0 RELEASE OF DWARF FORTRESS REMAINS.

REPENT AFORE THE COMING OF ARMOK.

This is a continuation of the "Why doesn't PTTG?? just get a blog already" series of posts.

I was struck by an unsettling revelation today. Like, I think, most people, I figured that schools (in the USA, at least,) generally did their job about as well as could be expected, with the occasional failure or problem of failable humanity. Then I started wondering something and realized I had no way to cross the gap of contradiction.

Simply put, schools take up a massive amount of time and resources. Students, if they were to do the two hours of homework per day per class expected of them, would send about 18 hours per day in class, traveling to school, doing homework, or doing extracurricular assignments. Considering the need to eat at home, this puts students into an impossible position of losing sleep, making work less effective, meaning they have to work later to compensate...

But in speaking to college teachers about the quality of undergraduates, they tell me that they have declined precipitously. Alleged adults with third-grade literacy, or practical innumeracy. Pathetic knowledge of current events, let alone history. Inability to comprehend due-dates or professionalism. I was considering a career in teaching at the time, and quite frankly the widespread disgust my professors had scared me off. They largely believed that the institution of higher education was on the verge of a collapse -- and this was two or three years ago.

As far as I understand it, teachers are paid starvation wages to corral students into rooms. The teachers pay for pencils out of pocket and eat the further pay cut, and the students do the homework for other classes in that classroom. The homework, classes, and for that matter teachers are all irrelevant, as they only exist to prepare students to take a test which exists for the purpose of gauging how good of a job the teachers did of preparing the students for that test. No writing, practical mathematics, current events, nor historical context is taught, as these are difficult to gauge on the test. A police officer patrols the halls, arresting students who complain about bullies, but fleeing at the first sign of gunfire -- which has now replaced football as the most popular high-school extracurricular activity. Have I got all the basics?

This isn't a STEM rant, nor a charter schools rant. STEM is great in its place, but even its advocates forget that the M in STEM stands for pure mathematics, which is just as naval-gazing as any underwater basket weaving certificate you care to name. Moreover, STEM alone makes for a fine employee but a poor citizen and an impoverished human being. As for Charter schools, they are a terrible phenomenon as they segregate the poor from the rich. If all children go to the same schools, then the rich and poor alike are incentivized to improve the quality of schools. Where the rich can take their children out, public schools turn into prisons by another name.

What's my solution? Well, that's the hard part. It may be that effective teaching is an impossible problem, like P=NP. If only there was a method of exploring alternative educational systems and estimating what the consequences of these policies might be. Perhaps some kind of field of study regarding the events of the past, or perhaps comparing activities undertaken by other, foreign groups of people. Unfortunately, my education never discussed such things, so they probably don't exist.

A recent steam update now allows you to look at your entire purchase history. (This tool totals it up for you; you can also use a spreadsheet and your account details tab.) Apparently, I've spent $4,490, or about $450 per year.

2008   $84.79
2009   $44.98
2010   $283.36
2011   $590.60
2012   $672.09
2013   $850.38
2014   $297.96
2015   $142.11
2016   $219.32
2017   $598.89
2018   $705.96

Welp, time to stop buying games for the next couple years to bring my average down. It's Dwarf Fortress forever!

EDIT: I took another look at the spreadsheet, and I didn't account for money I made selling TF2 items. I figured it'd be a like $10 or something... turns out I made more than $600. So my total cash-money down was actually $3,808.64, or $380/year.

Suppose that someone was spelunking in a French cave when a small earthquake caused a passage to open. That passage leads through a narrow constriction and emerges in a different part of the cave complex... ten years in the past. Each... let's say counter-clockwise trip through the loop takes one back what is apparently ten years. Each clockwise trip brings you ten years forward up until the present, at which point, if you go to the other side and walk clockwise, you'll eventually hit a wall of gravel and stone that is not present going the other way through the tunnel. It's so unstable that digging it away seems like a sure way to destabilize the entire area and possibly destroy the time hole itself; in short, there's a latest date, and it's the one that happened across the passage first.

In fact, this is not a purely time-travel related phenomenon. Rather, it's more like a series of parallel worlds, each with an internal date ten years earlier than the last, all linked by a series of portals in a French cave. If some outside force created the portals, it very likely happened at the "same time" across all of these worlds. Changes to a past world do not propagate to any later worlds, but they do persist in the world that the change was made in. If you go back to 1982 and chop down a tree, then wait six years, 1988 will have a chopped-down tree, but 1998, 2008, and 1018 will NOT have a chopped down tree.

It takes about two hours for an experienced caver to make the loop, meaning that with the eight hours of solid travel one would reasonably expect to achieve in a cave, one could move 40 years into the past. Geologically speaking, the cave extends backwards in time at least a million years in something much like its current state. It's probably still passable for ten or twenty million years back, although traveling far enough to reach that point would take 6,800 years of travel time!

Now, remember this is all hypothetical. I haven't even been to France, as far as you know. With that in mind, what would you do if you happened to be one of the first people to find out about the time hole? And what do you think would happen in general?

In the past, Paranoia has been cultishly adored as one that pits the game master against the players. The recent, kickstarted reboot maintains the formula, but shakes out a lot of the cruft, shapes it up for less adversarial play, and updates the slightly creaky "communists" of the old game with "terrorists," although the communists are still around, drinking vodka and complaining that nobody takes them seriously anymore.

But that's not what we're here to talk about. Paranoia takes place in Alpha Complex, a computerized subterranian realm where replaceable individuals toil under the uncaring eye of an omnipotent overseer. Each citizen -- color-coded by occupation and status -- is only a few degrees away from complete mental breakdown, and is only held together by daily doses of psychoactive beverages. Aside from the beards and the stoutness, it's basically the same as Dwarf Fortress.

For those familiar with Alpha Complex, the reboot (also known as the Kickstarter one, or version six) changes the setting mainly by pushing the date forward by a few centuries. Alpha Complex is in a terminal decay spiral, in fact. There aren't enough repair-bots to fix the repair-bot assembly plant. Friend Computer has been paranoid for a long time, but now it's less coherent. The current yearcycle is 214, but that's mostly meaningless since last yearcycle was 214 and next yearcycle, assuming AC makes it that far, will be 214 as well.

Clones are now equipped with Cerebral Coretech, which allows Friend Computer to access all of a clone's senses, except for touch; allows Friend computer to project useful and useless information on the citizen's eyeballs whenever it likes; allows Citizens to send communiques directly between themselves; and goes on the fritz whenever the wifi is down, which is, according to Friend Computer, never. According to the Clones who get splitting headaches every time the walk through corridor junction GAR-543222, it's pretty regular.

I've seen some discussion of Paranoia on these boards before, but nothing for the latest edition. Kickstarter backers (i.e., Infrared-intellect suckers like me) have almost all received their packs, and I'm looking for people who have played before and maybe have some particular troubleshooter missions or sectors or characters floating around AC that my players should run into.

Tacticus is the great game, invented, played, won, and lost in Armok's glory.

It is not true that there is no rhyme or reason to any action, nor that the game merely consists of players shouting out nonsensical commands, putting increasingly alarming pieces on the board, and adding or deducting absurd quantities of points from themselves or others; it merely appears that way to new players, in part because of the quite vast number of rules and rulebooks. To keep things simple, please cite the rules as you make use of them. Luckily, we are all experts here.

It is long past time for the new championship Tacticus game. Of course, many are here to play for the fantastic trophy, but I think we should make things a little more interesting. As each player joins, please ante up some small item of value to the pool for a friendly little wager. I'll chip in a mirror from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a spare they didn't need and threw out. You never know what you'll find while dumpster diving. It's not stolen at all.

Let's use my board:
No need to post new pictures of the board as you go, but do try to keep it in mind as you make your moves, and someone will eventually get around to uploading it for the newbies who may be following along.

Ok, that all out of the way, here's my action:

>I put seven Dwarf tokens into play clustered around the center of the board, and tap one to make it a miner. This costs 5 points, putting me at -5. (Old Dwarven Rules, tablet 2, "Basic Actions").

Now then, everyone jump in as you please. According to Pantshelm Rules Subsection T, Number 4.4, anyone can join in at any time, so don't hesitate to start playing!

Context

In short, a colossal leak has revealed a massive tax evasion scheme featuring the rich and famous. It's outright staggering, and the full data is yet to be released. There are certainly political repercussions to be felt in the US, but the big news so far is that Iceland's President, elected on a reform campaign, was revealed as a participant in the tax evasion scheme. Thousands of others are named, but I'll wait for the official release to find a credible summary.

I suppose that one interesting note is a look at who is and isn't reporting on this. USA today has an article about it, but CNN hasn't yet covered this OR Unaoil; at this point, it's barely ahead of E! as a source for political news.

A human vampire poet showed up in my tavern one day. Will he go all sparkly on my locals? And will I get a bad reputation if I kill him now?