Cyrus Draegur

… personally, i wish aliens would show up and be like, “bruh.” to save a sapient biosphere from extinction.

But I don’t actually believe it’ll be that.

Probably more likely a total systemic collapse of the United States of America due to its critical infrastructure crumbling past a point where its economics can adapt resulting in a stock market crash that wipes out entire industries. Then a cascade failure of all the nations that were still relying upon them to remain functional that crashes just about every OTHER economy across the entire planet (though potentially not china maybe) and leaves almost the whole population of our entire species to fend for ourselves.

After the initial riots disable urban centers and local peacekeeping forces fail to quell them, the bureaucrats wholly owned by corporate sponsors will go full mask-off and call in private security contractor shock troops to exterminate the uppity peasantry and brutalize any survivors back into submissive complicity. Anyone who didn’t fight will be targeted for detainment via guilt by association. Personal property will be seized “for peacekeeping purposes” and anyone who isn’t working for the corporations or mounting a strong enough resistance will be captured and concentrated in forced labor camps.

Billions of us will die, possibly even more than half of our entire species, whether from lack of critical support systems (lack of food, potable water, medical care, and/or shelter that can protect them from extreme temperature), by exploitation of warlords rising to fill local power vacuums (including corporate-owned city-state enclaves), or in conflict between corporate enclaves and said warlords, all exacerbated by hotter and longer heat waves and droughts, deeper and sharper cold snaps, HARSHER storms, BIGGER fires, MORE floods, rising sea levels, and no organized reconstruction efforts.

There may or may not be a few madmen who decide to pull the doomsday triggers and kick off a global thermonuclear exchange out of impotent rage that despite all their destructive power they’re still about to lose everything and are lashing out in hopeless desperation.

2036 heralds the watershed moment that people realize we’ve entered the new dark age. There is nothing we can do to stop it, but if you start right now, you might prepare yourself and your local community to mitigate the hardship… even if only temporarily.

A beret and a cravat!

A fedora for the necktie like a 1950s hard boiled detective!

A pointy wizard hat and a robe!

With THAT hat? Definitely a bowtie. It’s a verticality balance thing. The hat is vertical so the tie should be horizontal. Now, if the duck had a WIDE hat, THEN you go for the long tie.

so this takes place in 2073, and says it’s “37 years after The Event”

… 2036.

This is sending chills up my spine because this is the year me and my friends “joke” about “THE BIG ONE” happening. The big what exactly? Could be anything; whatever it is, the big mood is surrounding that SPECIFIC year. It’s been an in-group memetic reference in my circle for decades now. I think I first made an offhand remark about 2036 being when “it” happens all the way back in like 2003 or something

it’s probably just a coincidence.

…probably.

but damn what a coincidence.

You’ve heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!

Actually, on that point, I love it when a game becomes a platform for continuous content. Minecraft is a bit trite as an example but it fits: You buy it once, and you can beat it in a couple hours if you really want to, but you can extract as much enjoyment out of it as your imagination will allow, and the developers are constantly adding more stuff to do (although not all of what’s added feels great all the time…)

That’s the fun part: you don’t! :D

That is to say, they tried. And now there are basically no fucking games on whatever they’re calling the latest X-turd, and barely anything worth note on the PS5.

All the best games I’ve played recently are deliberately low poly models, low res textures, and 100% focused on JUST satisfying gamefeel and fun gameplay mechanics.

Fuck graphical fidelity and fuck “AAA” studios for wasting our time and money on it.

I WANT SHORTER GAMES WITH WORSE GRAPHICS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID MORE TO WORK LESS AND I’M NOT KIDDING

she had me at “socks”

w o u l d

Perhaps funko needs their claims adjusted.

They don’t need to update well; they’re a compromise to achieve slightly more reactive lighting than ‘baked’ ambient lights. Perhaps one could describe it as ‘parbaked’. Only the ones directly affected by changes of scene conditions need to be updated, and some tentative precalculations for “likely” changes can be tackled in advance while pre-established probes contribute no additional process load because they aren’t being updated unless, as previously stated, something acts on them. IF direct light changes and “sticks” long enough to affect the probes, any perceived ‘lag’ in the light changes will be glossed over by the player’s brain as “oh, my characters’ eyes are adjusting, neat how they accommodated for that.”–even though it’s not actually intentional but rather a drawback of the technology’s limitations.

I’ve seen an awesome “kludge” method where, instead of simulating billions of photons bouncing in billions of directions off every surface in the entire world, they are taking extremely low resolution cube map snapshots from the perspective of surfaces on a “one per square(area)” basis once every couple frames and blending between them over distance to inform the diffuse lighting of a scene as if it were ambient light mapping rather than direct light. Which is cool because not only can it represent the brightness of emissive textures, but it also makes it less necessary to manually fill scenes with manually placed key lights, fill lights, and backlights.

It’s also why a flashlight may be able to run for dozens of hours straight on a single battery but in video games it’ll die in minutes if not seconds. Realism is unfair. Also the same reason why nuclear reactors in video games are always dangerous. Because representing them realistically would be boring to the average adrenaline junkie “gamer”.

Russia has convinced me that Russia longer has a right to exist.

Honestly we gotta sink these castles faster if we ever want to reach the bedrock of this swamp XD

for real though, that’s exactly what happens if we can finish the republican party and bury it in the dustbin of history where it fucking belongs.

In any first-past-the-post electoral system, it will always settle toward there being two parties - how this came out the LAST two times America purged one of its two parties was that the remaining surviving party split.

So, after the GOP is well and truly DEAD, the Democrat party will massively recruit to fill the power vacuum and then it will begin to polarize. It will polarize into progressive and regressive factions, most likely. And when that happens, we all board the progressive train and systematically purge what remains of the old Democrats TOO.

At some point while this is going on, hopefully we can dismantle FPTP and replace it with proportional representation elected through ranked choice.

Also apparently basic sanity.

No one in their right mind wouldn’t want to punish the Republican party - especially to death.

Yeah. It needs to die.

The GOP needs to be taken out to the gravel pit and fed very fast, very hot buckshot until it stops moving.

But because we can’t get away with using that weapon to do the job, we’ll just have to use these icky Democrats instead. Even though the Democrats don’t WANT the Republican party to die, we are using the tools we have to do what must be done.

an extremely elegantly bite-sized HFY story

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