• 0 Posts
  • 261 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • Nah dude, this is legit, I lived through the tail end of the satanic panic years, those FBI raids were no joke. We used to scatter a layer of d4s along the stairs leading the basement, right before the tripwire that releases a full paint can on a string. Every player was issued a smoke bomb before the start of the game so we could make a clean getaway while the officers were distracted.





  • I think that’s 100% what this is, and it’s a very smart play if that’s the case. Intel are reeling from some significant setbacks, while Nvidia is swimming in cash. There’s never been a better time for them to make a play for the desktop CPU space.

    And they’ve got absolutely no illusions about what’s happening with AI. They’re the ones who are literally paying AI companies to buy their chips. They know the space is collapsing. But as the guys selling the picks and shovels, they can ride out that collapse if they’re smart.

    End of the day, if what we get out of this is a new, serious competitor in the CPU space, that’ll at least be some kind of win. With Nvidia’s money and expertise they could really force Intel to get their shit together. AMD chasing their heels is the only that’s ever kept them from completely going to shit, but more competition is even better. With all three major companies playing in both the CPU and GPU spaces, that could be really good for consumers.



  • They didn’t, either time. But reality got in the way of the meme so OP ignored it.

    The first Iraq war was an unqualified success. There’s really no way around that. Should they have gone the whole way and removed Saddam from power? Maybe. But the goal of the war was to protect Kuwait and that goal was accomplished.

    The second Iraq war was stupid, unnecessary, messy, pointless, badly mismanaged, and came at a staggeringly high cost. But it was successful. They achieved the regime change they wanted and ultimately created a puppet state in the Middle East. They’re using Iraqi bases right now in their attacks on Iran, something that would not possible if that war had been a failure.

    Doesn’t make it a good idea. Getting what you want isn’t great if you massively overpay for it.

    Afghanistan, on the other hand, absolutely counts as a loss. The US got nothing that they wanted - it didn’t even lead to the death of Bin Laden since he was hiding out in Pakistan - and wasted a tonne of lives and resources to ultimately just put the country back in the hands of the Taliban and give them a whole bunch of military hardware.






  • It’s from Jessica Jones, a very, very good show. David Tennant plays a man with mind control powers who uses them in all of the worst ways you can possibly imagine. It’s technically a Marvel comics thing, but the creators were given total carte blanche and went deep into the absolute nightmarishness of the subject matter. It’s basically a mix of detective noir and horror. Tennant and Ritter both deliver incredible performances and the show really plays with the abject terror of living in a world with superhumans in it. It’s like a version of Invincible that refuses to ever undermine the horror by cracking a joke.


  • I think you can have combat focused stories as long as your combat mechanics are lightweight and fast.

    When I switched out my Shadowrun game to The Sprawl, and then eventually a homebrew, I actually got less afraid of letting combat happen because I knew it wouldn’t eat up ninety percent of the session. By volume of time spent, combat became much less of each session, and yet conversely combat could happen at any time and every scene could feel like a fight might break out because there was no sigh “Roll for initiative…”

    With fast, lightweight combat mechanics (especially ones that do not have an initiative system) you get to weave violence into the substance of your story constantly, without the system taking place of the storytelling.

    That’s not to say that less combat focused games are a bad thing. The other big change I found was that it was also much easier to run sessions where no fighting occurred, because I didn’t have to figure out how to fill the several hours that should have been taken up by a fight, and the players never felt like there was a difference between fighting and talking and everything else. It all just became part of the broader texture of the story, so a session with no fighting didn’t feel weird or out of place.








  • Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you’re not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.

    You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it’s safe to do so.

    (For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)