u/PoopsMcScoots

96 was when they officially stopped selling it completely, but the phase out started in the 70s.

They used to be called it because they would add lead to gas to stop it from pinging.

Since then they’ve converted to using octane.

And honestly, at this point, I’m not even sure modern engines need octane.

Also, high octane doesn’t mean burns better, it means that it is less likely to explode under compression.

But anyway, I digress, why are we still calling gas unleaded?

That’s like Newton cookies advertising that their cookies are wasp larva free.

Or Highland advertising their milk is pus free.

Kind of weird you need to say it.

I like the show OK, and found myself screaming at the TV set more than a couple times, but I guess that’s kind of the appeal.

But overall I feel like the show and especially Adam just made Jamie into a punching bag, and they made fun of him for being weird and awkward, but never anything about his character.

Which Adam kinda comes off like he doesn’t have a lot of.

And if the company doesn’t want to lose customers, they can open a second location or buy a bigger lot.

Wanting Chick-fil-A is not a good reason to bring traffic to a screeching halt.

All these videos are the fucking same.

A woman slaps a guy, said guy puts her in the ICU.

And immediately gets thousands of upvotes.

And a lot of those votes are bots, as are the constant reposting of these videos.

Meanwhile, there’s 1000 fucking comments saying “equal rates equal lefts” or “equal rights equal fights”.

Half of it is Nazi bots, the other half are creepy fucking losers that the Nazi bots are targeting.

I’m so fucking over it.

Today I climbed up in my attic to check something and it was well past 150° in there, no exaggeration.

I’ve read some attics can get up to 200° and I am thinking that’s within the realm of possibilities of how hot it was.

Anyway, this got me wondering.

If my attic is going above 150° regularly there is no way that is not affecting my house.

I have tons of insulation up there on the floor, but there’s no way there’s not a bunch of heat coming down from the door and other locations.

So I looked it up if it’s common for people to do double insulation, as I was thinking it probably would help to slap some cheap Styrofoam panels or foam spray directly on the roof.

But looking it up, I’m seeing a lot of people saying that does very little.

How can that possibly be true?

Currently their most popular post is a series of people shouting the N-word, while playing the A-Team theme song.

This is not a sub that can be fixed through the mods, it is clearly a Nazi safe Haven and it needs to fucking go.

And you can have all the free speech you want, but do not expect Reddit to fucking post your bullshit for you.

Go back to the stormfront you dickless weasels.

There is a small group of extremely determined and organized racists that all work off the same same script and play book that very successfully took over Twitter.

Then after musk they moved onto Facebook, which is clearly just as bad as Twitter now.

And ever since Reddit went IPO they have set their sights here.

They are clicking on ads to be high value users.

They are posting videos 100 times a day that paint minorities in a bad light, often the same video, and have the swarm move in to vote and post the same lines:

-Usual suspect
-The fatigue is real
-I’m tired boss
-well well well
-🥷
-“people”
-figures
-and taking turns spelling out the N-Word one letter at a time from different bots

There’s more, but that’s the meat of it.

All the same over and over again.

They are NOT subtle.

Meanwhile you KNOW that they are getting as many mod positions as possible.

Reddit is self destructing right before our eyes and no one is doing anything.

This is NOT a “just ignore them” situation.

WHY IS EVERYONE CARRYING ON LIKE THIS ISNT CLEARLY HAPPENING???

Well, that’s my piece.

Here come the bots to gaslight me and tell me to “take my meds” or “are the Nazi bots in the room with us now?”.

It so painfully predictable and the opposition is just letting it work.

I’m a hobbyist and systems person, and I mostly just fiddle fart around for fun.

But anytime I try to do a project I always have the attitude of “ if you build it, they will come”, which generally means focusing on what I’m interested in and hoping that someone might find it interesting enough to join the project.

Delusional, I know.

But I am wondering if one day I have someone interested in the project what should be my expectation?

That I can just hand them a seat and they’re gonna do the animations and plug them in and possibly do some of the light!coding for it?

Or is it more realistically going to be they are going to hand me models and files and expect me to do everything from there?

I’ve been racking my brain on this.

They seem to use a couple different methods.

The grid can’t just be individual projectors, that’s too expensive. And they are definitely an image, because you can see the pixels. And I’m skeptical it’s a texture just repeating because the math to make that fit into a power of 2 is impossible. Is it just not a texture that is a power of 2?

Meanwhile, roads are a whole different animal. Also clearly a texture, but they change shape when you drop them. I have no idea.

Lastly the borders just have me floored. They are clearly a vector, probably a shader. But I’m baffled how they got it to follow the height map and coast lines.

And I’m further baffled why they are using three different solutions.

Any ideas?

If you were to accuse me of making this post while having lunch, you would not be wrong.

But the ratios are just completely off at every single location.

My idea of light, normal, and extra is 50%, 100%, or 150%.

Or let’s say for ketchup: a couple pea sized dots, a swirl, a couple swirls.

That seems normal and reasonable to me.

But no.

Not at McDonald’s anymore.

Now a normal amount is a pea sized dot, light means they take a cup of ketchup and fan the smell toward your burger, and extra means having a sarcastic amount caking the entire burger and covering the outside of the bun.

It’s exhausting.

Why can’t they just put a normal amount of condiment on a burger?

The Nazis, and I mean literally self identifying Nazis (or white supremacist), have VERY successfully organized and took over twitter.

They make like 20 accounts and work within networks to swarm spaces and push their content.

Then they moved on to Facebook when Musk took over and did a Nazi salute.

And Facebook stopped caring about comments COMPLETELY, and not even taking down death threats or calls for violence.

So I moved here to Reddit, which I avoided because the mods are out of control and redditors can be insufferable.

But at least there weren’t any Nazis.

Well, here come the Nazis.

I’m seeing organized dogpiles on comments they don’t like, and organized signal boosting of content they do like.

Meanwhile I’m seeing 2 separate communities that seem to be explicitly for Nazis. Randomvids4u or some shit like that and antiglobalism.

So…

Is Reddit gonna do something or is it gonna be another twitter situation?

Oh, and I fully expect this to get swarmed by said bots.

I’ve wanted to write this for a minute. It’s a take it or leave it post so there’s no need to be a dick.

Anyway, on to the essay.

When it comes to luck in video games I’m not seeing a lot of articles or video.

So I’m cobbling together this article of my observations and practices.

Let’s just start with luck and what it means.

Luck, in terms of gameplay, means an element of randomness that forces the player to make interesting choices.

The two most prevailing methods everyone knows is random luck and determinism.

In board game terms chess is deterministic, all actions are predetermined, and backgammon, where everything is luck.

Now that’s not to discredit random luck.

There is still strategy involved but ultimately but ultimately the player will never know the outcome and has to hedge odds.

Both have their place.

A diceleas RPG like the Elden Ring is almost completely deterministic, save for sone non-consequential drops.

While a game like XCom is almost all random luck.

Elden Ring is about the challenge laid out for the player.

Xcom is about hedging the chaos of random luck.

But what if I told you there was a third option?

An option where you have way more hands on the levers, and can hedge the line between the both of them.

This is where deterministic luck comes in to play.

You can have luck, but avoid a runaway scenarios where the player just keeps losing or winning.

Usually luck involves using a random number generator. That is, asking the game to randomly generate a number for each instance.

But there is an alternative where you can keep in complete control and measure out their ups and downs.

I present to you, the number array.

Original doom completely leaned into this, so I think this method has been thoroughly proven.

Long story short, instead of making the program randomly generate a number, you use an array of shuffled numbers then cycle through them.

This basically means that no single player is going to be over Advantaged because they still have the same amount of successes and failures.

Doom was a little bit simple and used the same static array.

But you can easily (and cheaply) reshuffle them when it hits the end.

OR you can alternate between drawing from a position that advances 1 spot and another that advances 3 spots (looping back when it hits the end) So long as the array is not divisible by three that will give you four times the length of the array in numbers.

And this is extremely lightweight and fast.

But there’s some more levers you can throw in there.

You can have multiple arrays that cycle.

The more raise you have the more chaotic it’s going to be.

One is going to be very balanced. Two is kind of the sweet spot where you can have some runway, but not break it. And three is going to be very chaotic. I would not recommend more than three, at that point you might as well just use a random number generator.

Other than that, you have to consider the length of your arrays. The number of arrays vs the number of them is going to be multiplying the chaos.

Now all that said, that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily done here.

You can also make a “due” mechanic.

So long as you can qualify a failure you can add that to a “due” value.

Basically a value that adds up with every unlucky role. If a roll plus the due is a win you spend the due points.

This is a very good means to let players have an event that knocks the enemy’s teeth out.

Or do it the opposite direction, and have it subtract when the player keeps getting lucky and winning draws.

Lastly, if luck is an explicit value there’s countless ways you can implement that.

It could statically raise all the array values.

It could be a multiplayer for the due mechanic.

Or it could mean a re-roll.

I’m not gonna sit here and explore every option, but maybe consider deterministic luck in your development because it allows you to have way more hands levers.

Like, you have a planning phase where you give orders.

And then you hit commit.

When all players hit commit the turn is resolved.

There’s obvious niche cases where you have to decide what happens when units that are not in combat collide.

Probably have them sit next to one another and wait until next turn to swap places, or move past them is possible.

But then combat gets interesting.

Rather than taking actions swapping at units on your turn seems like you could do a deterministic approach.

If you are next to an enemy unit, you
can order an attack.

If they attack back then it’s a relatively even match, terrain and other factors withstanding.

But if they retreat and you attack take the ground?

Or maybe if it’s two units next to two units, you can have both units attack one unit.

Also, this seems like it would really force players to sacrifice troops.

What other problems am I not seeing and what solutions would you implement?

Edit: I should mention that since this makes the game more of a meat grinder than civ, then this will have serious consequences for leveling troops.

The whole point of SEC is to protect the general public from predatory banks, brokers, and generally bad practices and actors.

They don’t do a goddamn thing anymore about the wealthy Epstein class fucking everyone up the ass anymore.

But they have all the time in the world to tell average citizens they can’t do micro loans, they can’t invest directly into an art project they like, they can’t invest in a company unless they make $1 million a year, they can’t get together with 1000 other people and by an investment property.

Whole lot of rules that are for the working classes “own good”.

But not a goddamn thing being done about the upper class.

This is nothing I’ve been doing in the immediate future, but I always loved the SNES Sim city game because of how stupid simple and fun it was.

And I was thinking something like that for civilization could be really popular.

One of the things that I was thinking would be interesting is to have population be a major currency.

And I would have every single unit and every single worker, and every single occupied tile count as a person.

Like just one person.

Every turn your population grows and you distribute where the new population goes.

This is how you claim territory.

Or if you need troops you drop that population into training.

Or make them a spy. Or a trader. Or a governor. Or whatever.

Every single unit is a single population represented as one person.