Rowin of Win

I hear you, I feel you, and I want the same, but…

I want more. I want pedestrians to step off the curb a little early sometimes, to take risks when things seem safe. I want people driving to be distracted and run a red light or even hit a car or pedestrian. I want the grade of the track and rain to impact the acceleration and deceleration of a train. I want card driven late at night to have a higher rate of intoxicated drivers and to get stopped by police.

The simulation could go deeper. The angle of the track at a turn could increase or decrease the safe turning speed for a train. The time since the last rain would change how much current rain makes the road slippery due to oil build up. People going home from a football game at a stadium would start bunched up together and saturate public transport and roads unless you put extra services on. Maintenance issues caused by you penny pinching would manifest in a range of ways from a minor difficulty getting to speed to derailing a whole train. Neglected IT systems could have ever increasing outages. Outsourcing development of your infrastructure could lead to increased cost over time especially if the cost of switching was high.

At the same time the increased use of public transport would lower the number of visits to the emergency room for asthma attacks. Making extra services available for big events would reduce the number of altercations and following that incarcerations. Everything could have flow on effects not by having them hard coded but by having natural reactions in the way entities interact. Someone is more stressed because industrial noise is happening close to their house late at night? They are more likely to be hasty crossing the road and get hit by a car.

Most of this is too big for a single developer or even a fairly good team, but the description of the interactions could be done at higher levels by having summary interactions, more general things like good or bad mood, short or long travel time compared to expectations, and rates of interactions rather than actual events playing out. Still, it would be awesome.

Absolutely not, no spirituality or religion at all. Strong beliefs about how the world doesn’t work (lots of specific debunked ideas, lots of ideas that are incoherent or inconsistent) but not sure about a bunch of stuff. I don’t think it would be meaningful to say there is a mind behind the creation of the universe because what we consider a mind and what that mind would have to be are two ideas with almost no overlap. If there is something out there magically making the universe what it is I don’t think we would be able to recognise it at all, let alone communicate with and understand it.

I’m 17 years without alcohol, 16 without “le drugs”, and 15 without smoking. I still have issues in my life and challenges to solve but wow, all of those would be harder and more numerous if I still behaved like I used to. I had a fairly short period of massive excess and had a few lucky moments of clarity which resulted in me quitting it all one after another. My partner and I have been together since just after I quit drinking and I am really glad they never had to see me being my worst self.

My biggest takeaway is it really does get easier with time. The hardest times were within a short time of quitting. The longer I sustained the more ingrained the change became and now I would be stubborn and resist any sort of backslide.

The a fanfic author drops a new chapter my partner is at least as excited as I am when a new video game drops. There is nothing cringe about fanfiction, it is creative writing just as valid as writing a new piece from scratch, just with more context built right in. If you like fanfic then maybe writing it is a good idea for you

That said, when it comes to writing, reading is the key. Read lots and lots and lots, then write whatever takes your fancy, but never stop intaking new works. All writing is some sort of remixing and that is OK, you just want to have a lot to draw from and then write a lot of bad stuff to learn how to write well.

Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.

For a shockingly long moment I thought this was about Counter Strike 2.

Still, awesome, mixed use zoning, maybe we can have tram lines with grass and tunneled train lines.

I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.