Great description, the thing most people get wrong about defending science and history is that they dont convey how fucking weird it really is.

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!

That is great to hear, definitely seemed like FreeCAD was REALLY basic in the past, but there is such a big gap for a really fully featured FOSS Cad software!

Well we can’t live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can’t live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?

I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it… and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too…so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.

Sure, I definitely overreacted and I honestly was pretty stressed out the day I replied so yeah, fair. I think I have a point, this just wasn’t the salient place for it and I was too tired to realize that in the moment.

shrugs you know people have been confidently making these kinds of statements… since written language was invented? I bet the first person who developed written language did it to complain about how this generation of kids don’t know how to write a proper sentence.

What is in freefall is the economy for the middle and working class and basic idea that artists and writers should be compensated, period. What has released us into freefall is that making art and crafting words are shit on by society as not a respectable job worth being paid a living wage for.

There are a terrifying amount of good writers out there, more than there have ever been, both in total number AND per capita.

You know the weirdest shit about fractals is that if the fractal is space filling (you repeated the pattern at all scales for infinity and end up filling a 2d area with lines somehow than that fractal exists between the integers definitions of dimensions). A 1d simple line fractal pattern can through the bullshit magic of math have a dimensionality of 1.65 or whatever, it is weird shit.

I am sure I got something wayyyy wrong about this lol, but whatever.

Thanks Kyle

fuck

Where is this from?? Is this AI?

At this point in Earth’s timeline (1980) AI had not yet gained control of Earth’s volcanoes through a projection network of 80s music into the asthenosphere so this indeed was a naturally occurring volcano as opposed to Uber or Amazon.

My house is huge bro

Hey I am sorry I gotta go to the bathroom can you hold it I know it’s my turn but I’ll be right back I swear

My main gripe with your comment is just the “This is so obvious! Why hasn’t anyone made this?” attitude. Because it ignores the work that needs to go into each of these tools, often for almost no recognition/compensation.

It is obvious, and you still aren’t seeing it. You keep misidentifying the main thing I point out as the beginning of the creative process and a catalyst to seeding inspiration for level and world design as an arbitrary complicated ask that has nothing to do with the experience of level designers engaging in the creative process nor how organic and engaging a landscape feels in the end product.

It’s like, an axiom to this conversation is that the knowledge I have of geology must mean MORE work for game designers and that gives you a right to portray me as having a snarky, unappreciative attitude towards the incredible amount of work that goes into video game development.

It honestly portrays that lack of interest in geology well, you almost seem annoyed that I would suggest geology contains anything that might be of use to video game development because it involves learning about something other than computers and computers are already hard enough.

I didn’t make the computers too hard to fit anything else in your brain, I also constantly give mad props to my favorite video game designers especially indie ones and ESPECIALLY open source projects with loving communities or developers who have maintained wonderful games for years and years.

…but yes… this whole landscape thing? It is obvious as fuck to a geologist, I’m sorry but it is. Treating open world design like it is this thing you have to build entirely by hand or with awkward algorithms that attempt to procedurally generate some unsettling landscape that has to be fixed by hand JUST as much one like this

Mountain ranges blocking off high level areas, terrain elevation being changed to make sure certain landmarks are more visible/look better on camera, resources such as water/ores, etc needing to be close together for balancing reasons (For survival/crafting games), etc. Reality doesn’t always conform with one’s artistic vision.

Procedural generation has to be hemmed in by guard rails, Minecraft doesn’t just generate ores willy bully with no thought or check for game balance? No procedurally generated game worth its salt does and there are innumerable successful examples of those. Why would it be any different for building worlds with geologically inspired tools in a fashion I describe?

I don’t understand why you see a difference there.

These processes also don’t have to be extremely advanced geophysical simulations, you can abstract shit into elegant systems that reflect deep complexity, it is called good game design.

Another thing to consider is that in game design, realism will always take a backseat for good gameplay. A map that naturally guides the players where they need to go is usually much more desirable than one that is realistic but unintuitive. Plus when you add magic, gods, or even enough sci-fi, the bar for what counts as a realistic landscape really goes out the window anyway.

Why would a map that reflected natural landscapes be more unintuitive than an awkwardly fabricated one that doesn’t reflect any landscape a person has seen looks like?

sigh and I am really trying not to come off like I am claiming everything has to be realistic to the stupid little details only a geologist would know.

…but also if natural landscapes ARE unintuitive to most people now, doesn’t that feel like an existential crisis to you? Shouldn’t game developers seek us to reconnect our intuition with natural landscapes to try to heal that awful severance of our soul?

My point was that building landscapes to tell stories in without building the landscape as a story too is a silly thing to do, both for immersion of the player and for overall work.

There is no reason a sort of clay like modeling simulator couldn’t give you an artistically conveyed sense of two continental plates colliding, and if the tools were playful and immediate to use (like I pointed out, just being able to smash continents together by clicking and dragging them in different directions at each other like Besieged but for geology) it would be easier for world designers overwhelmed by a blank canvas to start because their canvas already has a story rather than suffocating blank space.

Are we just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists sitting in dark rooms with a computer and pinboard against the wall, complete with strings between posted mugshots of lava domes and dikes, muttering to ourselves as we circle vaguely roundish things on a map in red ink and exclaim “ANOTHER!!!” ??

No, we are usually in the middle of nowhere in the woods hiking erratically across the landscape with nobody around so we tend to shout at things more than mutter because why not.

Super cool!!

Aain I love how it looks like a drunk geologist made a big scribble on a map and said before passing out “that Campi Flegrei, that’s a BIG one right there!” and you are just left looking at the map being like… what… are you sure that just looks like you randomly circled a huge part of the landscape?..like… really the whole bay?

Surely theres been some research into like pressure relief holes or something…antacid tabs?

I am sure there are lots of geologists who have thought of it, it makes sense right?

The problem is that nobody gives a shit about listening to geologists unless they are talking about where to find oil. Even if a geoengineering project of this scale and magnitude (with such catastrophic consequences if it goes wrong) where possible with near current geological science and hardware this degree of interest and investment of society is only ever committed to visions techbros provide and I don’t think a single techbro has ever taken a geology class and actually remotely paid attention.

It was geologists in the 1970s who first pointed out the obvious connection between human released CO2 emissions and global warming.

Nobody gave a shit :)

(plenty of complicit geologists who made a veryyyyy good living too don’t get me wrong)

We are just weirdos going on about rocks except when those rocks are really valuable and provide the capacity to create empires but even in those cases we are never really part of that, we are always still the weirdos going on about rocks who everybody is like “ok but can you shut up now and point to the gold on the map?”.

I know it is a weird example but look at the landscapes of virtual environments, video game developers have been trying to craft evocative landscapes since the beginning of video games even before 3D engines, you would think that some of them might have been interested to find inspiration for world design from the dizzying variety of landforms and stories described in geology (that are perfect to engage a player with because geological landscapes are layered stories first and foremost).

From the perspective of a geologist, it is obvious for game developers to make world building tools that allow molding an entire mountain range for an open world rpg by first starting with two continents and smashing them together with your mouse over and over again until it made a compelling starting point (instead of just making every damn mountain by hand or just writing a dumb algorithm to randomly generate mountains) and then running a massive river through the mountains for 10 million years to create the main valley for the game.

Todd Howard released a screenshot of the next Elder Scrolls Game

the story here was there was a river and then a mountain range came in (some new kid named Appalachians) and was like “sorry dude” but then the Delaware River was like “I am literally going nowhere bro, put your silly mountains wherever you want and I will cut you down when you get in my way”. This friendly conversation has been going on for 400-500 million years, which is about 1/8 of the earth’s history (the earth was a hot mess for the 1st billion so that barely counts). A lot of rivers are pretty lazy, but not the Delaware River, you gotta give it credit.

A geological sandbox for large scale world design that allowed game developers to quickly and intuitively create landscapes with layered pasts and local variety that perennially inspired curiosity from players seems so obvious to me it is painful. (Also as a fun toy for its own sake).

Like damn… video games barely know how to make a rock outcrop look natural and it is 2024… ——

All that being said to point out that your vision of a cool geo-engineering project is mostly unrealistic because of humans not even bringing geology into the picture. Part of the globalized contagion of late-stage capitalism is VERY crucially a collective forgetting of the stories in the landscapes around us. We have been taught to see the landscape around us as a background for our genius, not the primary gift passed down by our ancestors, the foundation of all the beauty in our lives and a fascinating machine of anarchy that creates endless forms of order.

Everywhere all over the world people are extracting groundwater at a ridiculously unsustainable rate (the fucking AXIS EARTH IS TILTED ON has changed because so much groundwater has been extracted) even while geologists try to point out there is going to be no clean water left???, the dysfunction of our thinking with respect to land goes very deep unfortunately.

Instead we are left with this trash Elon Musk-esque obsession with spiritually disconnecting ourselves from Earth and leaving for Mars as if the idea of separating us from the landscape (and natural systems/biosphere) we evolved in makes any sense at a basic level of our body maintaining homeostasis effectively or is something we would even desire to do (thanks for that one, sci-fi shows and books!). It is like plucking an ant from an ant colony, carefully placing it into the ocean and whispering “now you can start a new life here”…… It makes no sense.

The idea of not having a internal monologue is kinda strange to me. I have a constant internal monologue. Like there doesn’t go a moment by without me talking to myself in my head.

You should try taking Finnegans Wake, especially before going to bed, and see what happens. It rewires your internal monologue syntax in some really strange way that is not far from the experience of sleep.

Hell yeah!