I was of the camp that said that even millions was far too small. This is a war spread out over thousands, if not tens of thousands of star systems. Hell, Venators have crews of ~10,000, and we see multiples go down in a single battle. I wouldn’t be surprised if a million clones died on some bad days alone.
Also someone who played through that: I agree.
Nostalgia Rorquals Online have a very rose-tinted view of the time. Sure, there were more ships in space… but a lot of those “ships in space” came in the form of an entire cap fleet landing on your cruiser roam the second you tackled a Rorqual. Fatigue timers and diminishing returns were absolutely needed.
I think the current crop of issues wouldn’t be fixed by just going back; they can be traced to other factors, like Citadels encouraging players crowding together.
Have a couple different ones:
Star Wars:: How many Clones were actually in the Clone Army (and, by extension, how large are the setting’s armies in general)?
The original wording used in 2003’s Attack of the Clones is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous, so from that point on fans have forever debated this. On the one hand, there’s arguments that the visible cloning facilities and formations on-screen suggest literal interpretations of “unit” as “soldier”, and armies of a few million at most. On the other hand, fans have also pointed out that a galaxy-spanning conflict being fought by fewer troops than fought in World War 2 is ridiculous, and the casualty figures given would mean the entire clone army had been wiped out many times over - unless “units” can be taken to mean a much larger formation of troops.
Expanded Universe materials (both pre- and post-Disney) have given figures supporting both sides.
Eve Online: Was the game better or worse in the era of “Rorquals online”?
Context is, at that point in the game’s history, much of the game’s economy was driven by very large mining capital ships - Rorquals - systematically stripping in-universe resources at high speed.
Proponents suggest that the presence of vulnerable ships out in space doing things promoted conflict, and that this induced conflicting player groups to raid each others’ territory, creating game content. Detractors argue that Rorquals inevitably existed under the protective umbrella of existing large player groups, meaning only those groups could effectively harvest resources, creating a positive feedback loop where strong alliances got stronger and everyone else got wiped out.
(Personally, my answer is ‘both’ - but most of it has to do with other game changes besides Rorquals.)
Railfanning: Is coal-fired steam locomotives going away a good or bad thing?
Coal-fired steam is undoubtedly cool. you get the authentic sensations and smoke clouds that oil-firing really doesn’t provide. Many who favor it bemoan old coal-fired locomotives being converted to run on oil, sometimes also arguing the locomotives should be preserved as historically used.
On the hand, other fans point out that coal firing creates a very real fire hazard; there have been multiple brush- and forest-fires started or thought to be started by coal-fired locomotives. There’s also issues with coal becoming harder to get as use in power generation dwindles, and these fans would prefer to convert to oil rather than not run at all.
Most people just see a steam locomotive and go “Cool!”
I saw it much later on. Originally dropped out after Eva 01 straightup graphically eats the one Angel; that was too much even for me. Later on I picked it up and finished it.
In retrospect, it’s not my favorite. I was introduced to Gundam before Evangelion, and that ticked all the right boxes for what I enjoy in a Mecha show (less symbolism and weirdness, more grittiness and politics). But I still admire Evangelion for the qualities it has: Its characterization, its message(s), and for doing its unique thing - to say nothing of the raw value of the animation.
Rebuild was decent. It went from a mild retread of Evangelion, to once again completely bonkers off the rails, to somehow wrapping around again to picking up similar positive themes Evangelion had.
The opening is one of those things that just sticks with you. Minimalist artwork with just the studio’s name and a couple of lines sung gently… then this sick trumpet beat drops and the title flashes in the most 90s way possible.
I’ve been looking for a decent one, mostly to potentially run a fan in the event of a summer outage. I’ve actually been surprised how hard it is to find one that will support it at a reasonable price.
In 2002, there was a game called Naval Ops: Commander. It’s a warship simulator game, with the tweak that you could build your own warships out of an assortment of parts. I don’t think I’ve played it in 20ish years. Definitely more than 15.
Yeah, the Main Hangar (essentially, your ‘home screen’ once you’d selected a playthrough) Theme is on loop right now. The ending ~10 seconds of it, to be specific.
For clarity, when you say “anti-gun”, what is that position? Like, “average people should not have them, period”?
Not trying to knock on you - it’s that there’s so many positions which get lumped under “pro-” or “anti-”, it helps to actually understand where someone is coming from.
Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.
At the same time, you’re 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.
At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just… talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!
Yeah, that was a miss.
Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the “wild west” era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.
For me it’s the ‘Can you hear me now?’ animations. Every once in a while, when I see someone having issues with their phone/earbuds/whatever, those pop into my head unbidden.
Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.
Yeah, I 100% get where you’re coming from. (And I agree with you; the Ori seasons weren’t the strongest of SG-1. Babylon 5 had a similar problem where they wrapped up the entire show’s myth arc, only to be told there’d be a sudden fifth season. It showed.)
I think for me a lot of it depends on whether they decide to “un-conclude” the existing story or branch it off in an entirely new direction. Like, looking to Stargate again, the Ori seasons struggled, but Atlantis was a great way to propagate the concept with a new cast, characters, and story.
I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.
It’s an episode almost or entirely composed of clips from previous episodes. Usually it has some sort of a framing device - for instance, in an adventure show, it might be the characters taking a ‘breather’ after a tough encounter and musing on how they got here. Or one character might confront another about a situation that’s been brewing, and the clip show is showing bits of that situation leading up to the confrontation.
On an aside, reception to clip shows is an interesting shift. For a long time, one or two were an accepted part of a long-running series - either because it let you make an episode on the cheap using recycled footage, or because in the pre-internet-streaming-on-demand world, it let audiences catch up on what had been happening in episodes they might have missed or seen months ago.
Nowadays, however, they’re almost universally viewed negatively, as their reason for existing is absent and they’re mostly taken as a sign of poor planning by the creators.
Civilizations are big, and people are resilient - so we rarely find things like, “This plague/volcanic eruption/extinction of a species 100% wiped out this civilization and their culture”. People tended to move away rather than just die, and their cultures tended to assimilate and combine rather than just vanish.
But there are placed where we reasonably believe that natural consequences resulted in the decline of civilizations:
The decline of the Sumerian nations is associated with increasing salinity of the fields in southern Sumeria, shifting populations north towards Akkad. I believe there’s still uncertainty over whether this was driven by Sumerian irrigation practices or some other cause, but the fact that it happened is undeniable.
The Hittite Empire was a vast prehistoric empire which collapsed as part of a period of upheaval known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. The cause of the collapse is still disputed, but it is clear that there was some environmental shift involved. Warfare, plague, and economic changes may also have contributed.
In both these cases, we have only very fragmentary remnants of the surviving culture, often filtered through the lens of subsequent civilizations’ recordings. The Hittites even were arguably “lost” for a time - until the mid-1800s, they were only known through Biblical references, rather than any relics or ruins.
And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.
Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.
Yes, unfortunately. Or at least seems to.
This person was an eye-opener for me in terms of how deep political groupthink and unquestioning belief can go. He’s an intelligent person in a highly technical position that requires plenty of reasoning and thought, but if the right political commentator says something, it is absolute truth.
The overwhelming thing I remember is a sense of “Huh, I guess this is it.”
There was a possum in the middle of a busy road, acting oddly. Walking in slow circles, pausing to stare, wandering back and forth… just generally acting odd. I was concerned it might be rabid, and nobody else had called 911 yet, so I did. Gave them the info, they connected me with the local dispatcher, and that was that. Didn’t stick around to see what happened.
When I got home I found out that Possums are almost never rabid. Poor thing had probably been hit by a car. Animal control probably would’ve been a better option, but when I’d called I was actually worried for anyone else who stumbled into it.
I think the life cycle of collaborative projects - small circle to big blowup, drifting from the original spirit or ethos for better or worse - will be accelerated by algorithmically-driven social media. Hell, it’s already happening.
When I look at older collaborative fiction, it’s much more likely to remain centered around a few core creators and their guidelines or approaches. The more content in a project is owned by them, the more they’re able to influence others to not diverge too far from it.
When things blow up massively, that can all change in a heartbeat. Whoever is running the project frequently struggle to maintain those guidelines: Either because they don’t want to seem like controlling jerks, or because the flood of new content genuinely overwhelms their ability to moderate.
The problem is, this accelerated lifecycle can also burn out projects far more rapidly as people become disconnected from what appealed to them in the first place.