Usually. Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped. The gameplay was crazy fun; it took all the slow-mo coolness of Max Payne and added wall-running, super jumps and martial arts. The combat was lots of fun, and the story was all written by the Wachowski’s to tie in with the second and third movie, including actual scenes that they filmed as part of the process. They took it really seriously, to them it was an essential part of the story.

Obviously the whole Matrix 2 & 3 saga has some problems, it’s not the Wachowski’s best work (how could it have been, they had a plot for one movie that they were told to expand into two), but the game is still a really fun entry in their ouvre.

Short answer? You can’t.

Long answer; You can if you’re willing to basically devote the entire economic output of a large country to the problem.

Here’s the thing, putting aside cooling, the entire notion of a data-centre in space is insane. Falcon Heavy is about the most efficient launch vehicle we have right now, and it still costs $1500/kg that you send up. A fully loaded data centre rack can weigh around 1,000kg. Almost all of that weight is that actual hardware in the rack; y’know, the computers and hard drives that are the data centre.

So, sending a single rack to orbit costs $1.5m. A very small data centre might contain around 20 racks. The ones being used for modern AI workloads and the like are more in the 50,000 - 100,000 range. But even if we keep this tiny, super boutique, only for data too important to keep on earth, you’re still looking at $30m just to put the actual hardware into orbit.

That sounds OK, but that is only a tiny fraction of our costs. This is all going to snowball massively. On earth those racks are cooled by massive industrial HVAC systems that each have their own standby generator as well as the astonishing amount of power they pull from the grid. That works because they can circulate cool air around the racks, blast it out into the atmosphere, then pump in fresh air that you cool in the HVAC. You have none of that in space.

So instead you’re stuck with radiating heat through massive heat sinks with massive arrays of fins. And you have to get the heat from each individual computer, with all their really hot components, out to the heat sinks. That means you have to liquid cool every single component in this orbital data centre. Thousands of CPUs, thousands of hard drives, all liquid cooled. Then your liquid cooling has to run through unimaginably large heat sinks and radiators. At a wild guess I would bet that the total weight of all this cooling equipment (heat sinks are solid metal, and liquids are heavy and hard to fly into space because they shift around) would probably be a hundred times that of the equipment being cooled. So you’re talking about billions of dollars just in hardware to orbit costs, across thousands of launches.

And then you have to actually assemble everything. That means you need engineers who are also trained to work in orbit (so, very highly paid), and you need to get them up there. Since there’s nowhere for them to stay during construction, that means they have to go up, do a few hours work, and then come back down. Eight hour EVAs are not unheard of, so in theory your guys can do a full shift up there, but holy shit you have just invented the world’s most expensive commute by many orders of magnitude. It takes months to years to get a data centre up and running, and that’s one that doesn’t have all of these added complexities. Plus, working in space is really, really slow compared to working on Earth. You’re in a clumsy suit, wearing clumsy gloves, in an environment where nothing moves likes it’s supposed to and where you can never put anything down because it’ll just float away. Building something like this would take years of daily launches. You can’t just pre-build the components and send them up either, because everything is so ridiculously heavy that even a small chunk would exceed the weight limit of any launch vehicle we have today.

Oh, and going into space is really taxing on the human body, so you’d have to give those engineers lots of breaks, meaning you’d probably need to cycle different teams in and out for this whole thing, so that runs up your costs even higher.

And then what happens when something breaks? Liquid cooling needs constant maintenance, it’s very fiddly stuff. And hard-drives fail. Your average data centre will be swapping out a few drives every day. Even a small one is going to need a drive replaced every few weeks or months. Every time that happens someone has to go up there. You can’t just call Ted and tell him to hop in his Civic.

But we still haven’t gotten to the biggest problem yet. Power. Data centres use a truly staggering amount of power, between the computers and the cooling. Right now data centres, on their own, account for almost 5% of all power usage in the US. That’s fucking insane. So you need to somehow power everything you send up there. Powering things like space stations and communications satellites works because we build them to be very, very efficient. Even communications satellites, which have to process huge amounts of data, use between 1,000 and 5,000 watts. A single server rack, by comparison, can consume between 5,000 and 10,000 watts. So that’s 2-5 communication satellites worth of power for one rack. And we said that our absolutely tiny data centre needs twenty of those (and, again, I really need to drive home how small that is; that’s not a data centre, it’s a single room in a low-end corporate HQ). There is absolutely no way you’re going to strap enough solar panels to this thing to generate the kind of power it needs. Not without increasing the weight and construction time by another factor of one hundred. So now you need nuclear power of some kind… Which generates huge amounts of heat. So now you have to radiate that heat. Which increases the weight and construction time by another hundred-fold.

When all is said and done, we’re talking about high billions to low trillions of dollars to build a data centre that could fit in an apartment. Why? What could be possibly be worth that? Even if you were to make that argument that someone has data so valuable that it couldn’t possibly be kept on Earth, that still doesn’t make sense. On Earth you could, for a fraction of that price, bury that data in a vault deep underground or put it on an island or store it deep in the arctic where the environment makes it difficult to even approach (and solves your cooling costs). And in all of those locations, with that kind of money to throw around, you could hire a small army to protect it. Whereas in space, ultimately your precious data is just sitting there, basically unprotected. If it’s worth that much, then it’s worth it for a state-level actor with launch capabilites to send a few guys up to steal it.

This is a wild pipe-dream cooked up by silicon valley tech-bros who didn’t consult a single engineer in the process.

Edit to add: In the article the company behind this claims they’re going to use robots to do all the construction, and that it will be powered by solar panels multiple kilometres wide. Again, given everything I just said about the cost of putting that much material in orbit, vs the actual benefits, there is literally no way the economics of that works. Sure, you can knock out some of the costs I’ve listed, but you’re still basically taking the cost of a tiny data centre and massively amplifying it for absolutely no benefit. At best I suspect they’re just trying to raise their profile by making sensational claims.

Re: 4

Very, very common misconception, because of how often you see things/people in movies instantly freeze in space. But it’s just not remotely true.

The analogy the previous user gave is perfect; space is a thermos flask. It’s a perfect insulator.

To break that down a little more, you have to understand that heat moves in two basic ways; conduction and radiation. Conduction is when molecules agitate the molecules next to them. Radiation is when molecules give off electromagnetic energy.

The way a thermal camera works is that it sees the otherwise invisible infra-red light that hot things give off. That’s the radiation part of heat transfer. Radiation is, on the whole, a really slow, really bad way of moving heat.

Conduction is much faster, especially when there’s a big difference in temperature between the two mediums. That’s why you (average temp around 37C) can stand in a 21C room and feel really comfortable. You’re losing thermal energy, because the air touching your skin is colder, but you’re losing it at about the same rate your body naturally makes it.

But if you step outside into air that’s -20C, your temperature is going to start dropping very fast. There’s a much, much bigger difference in temperature now, so the heat transfer is faster. Also that air is probably moving because of the wind, which means the parts of the air getting warmed by the transfer from your skin are instantly replaced by fresh, cold air.

In space you have none of that. Just vacuum. There’s no molecules in vacuum to agitate. So aside from the very small amount you lose from radiation, heat just builds up. This is a huge problem for spaceships and satellites. They have to build in massive fins to help radiate heat away faster.

But it gets worse, because you know what radiates heat really, really well? The Sun. Which you are now exposed to, whenever you’re not directly in Earth’s shadow, with no atmosphere to absorb any of that incoming radiation. So the biggest problem for objects in space is rarely getting too cold, and far more often it’s getting too hot.

Introducing something that already has massive cooling requirements into that environment would be a total fucking nightmare.

No, the Firefox snap genuinely is awful. It takes forever to load and runs like ass.

I’ve been wearing Rayban glasses for years, but at this point I think I’m going to have to look for a different brand, because we’re very quickly going to get to the point where anyone wearing them immediately becomes suspect.

The line “Mario is a war criminal” is seared into my brain forever.

I think GMs in general need to get more comfortable with picking different campaign or story lengths. Some things are a movie, some things are a 6 episode prestige TV series, and some things are an old school 24 episode multi-season order. The benefit of the latter is that it gives you a lot more room for character development and world-building, but it can also drag and end up with a lot of filler. Some stories really benefit from a shorter, more focused runtime. Some stories are best told in just a handful of sessions. Some should just be a one shot; if you’ve never run a horror one shot I urge you to give it a go; there is an incredible power in being able to kill off the entire cast by the end of the session. I once opened a Shadowrun campaign by running a one shot with pre-made high level characters who went on a mission that turned very very bad, and resulted in them all being killed by the campaign big-bad. Then I had the players create their characters for the main game. They were all hooked, and wanted to find out what the fuck happened to the first team, who the big bad was, and what was going on on the spooky island research lab where they all died.

Yes, this is superb advice. Give yourself room to play around with things and try stuff that might not work.

Unfortunately my secret goblin ninja attack team got rounded up and deported, so I was forced to actually give a real answer instead of having them murdered. Curses.

For those who don’t know, there was an event in Morrowind where you found a corpse carrying three scrolls of “Icarian Flight” (if you were in the right place at the right time you’d actually see him hit the ground). The way the scrolls worked was they buffed your Acrobatics skill by 1000 (in a 1-100 system) allowing you to soar across the entire map in one bound… but the duration on the buff was shorter than the time it took to land, and your ability to absorb fall damage was also controlled by your Acrobatics skill. So unsuspecting players would try one of the scrolls and suffer exactly the same fate.

The genius was that these items weren’t actually useless; there were two ways to use them effectively. The first was to simply cast a second scroll right before you landed. The second was to have a spell, scroll or item that granted levitation; by casting it right before landing you could simply negate the fall damage and drift to earth safely. A famous speedrun used both methods, along with another trap item, The Boots of Blinding Speed; they made you incredibly fast. And blind.

Sure. I’ll try not to waffle too much, but here are six general pieces of advice I have for running serious games:

You Have to Set the Tone

This sounds really obvious, but it’s the step that so many GMs miss. You can’t assume your players are on the same page as you. If there’s a tone you want from your game, you need to actually say that right from the start. Tell people what you want from them. Otherwise how can they deliver it? A great way to do this is to give points of reference. I often describe my games as “Serious, but more Firefly than Heat”; the characters make jokes as a way of dealing with their situation, but the situation is also very real and very serious. Joking about the bullet won’t stop it from killing you. There’s banter and fun and found family, but in the face of deadly threats. Try to find similar points of reference for your games. Are you looking for Michael Mann, or Guy Ritchie? Do you want deadly serious, or do you want “One of those surprisingly dark Saturday morning cartoons,”? There’s a lot of different flavours of storytelling out there, so it helps to give your players the right idea going in. That way, if it’s not for them, they can tell you right from the start instead of ending up at odds with the game because it’s not what they wanted.

Session Zero is Essential

If you’re not familiar with session zero, it’s basically a thing you do before the game starts. It doesn’t technically have to be separate session, but the point is that you should avoid the urge to just have everyone turn up with characters and start playing. Make character creation a collaborative event; you want your players to be having a conversation with you and each other about the kinds of characters they want to play, and the kinds of stories they want to tell. This is your opportunity to catch game breaking problems early. One player wants to be a vampire, another wants to be a vampire hunter? Have them talk it out. Figure out how this is going to become the kind of story that everyone will enjoy, or what alternatives can be explored if there isn’t a good way to make that story work. This is also your opportunity to lay out the tone and feel of the game and have your players make characters that fit that tone. If you’re running a serious game and one of your players wants to be Bimbo The Fart Gnome, this is your opportunity to simply say “No.”

“Yes, and…” is For Comedy. Learn the Power of “No, but…”

The worst piece of advice ever given to new GMs is “Yes, and…” which is a technique from improv comedy. If you want improv comedy it’s a great technique. If you want serious stories, it’s a terrible technique. Instead, learn to say “No, but…” That means you can refuse things that will break your story, but you must always do so in a way that encourages and values the player’s participation. In practice this means you need to offer them an alternative that carries the spirit of their idea into something workable. This doesn’t even have to be obvious; sometimes it can just be a matter of reinterpreting the player’s intent in a way that works. If your player says “I want to use my Intimidate skill to stare down the Mafia Don and make him do what I say,” you can tell them to roll for it, and if they succeed, respond with “The Don laughs and slaps his thigh. ‘Damn, you’ve got moxie kid. Tell you what…’” They don’t give the character exactly what they want, because they’re not intimidated, not even slightly, but they respect the spine they showed and warm up to them as a result. The player might have been entirely wrong about the amount of power they had in that situation, but they weren’t made to look foolish. Their success mattered.

Consequences are Everything

The single most important part of running a serious game is that consequences have to matter. This is, I have to admit, part of why I don’t try to run serious games in D&D, a system that is largely allergic to consequences, but that’s beside the point. What matters is the choices your players make, good and bad, have to result in real, meaningful outcomes. This is why a lot of GMs fail at running serious games; they go in with a story in their head, and they try to railroad the players into that story, but by doing so they remove any meaningful consequence to the player’s choices. The outcome will always be the same; the story will go in the direction the GM wants it to. Most players will respond to this by saying “Fuck it, might as well be silly, it doesn’t matter anyway.” If you want your players to care about the story, you have to make their choices important and meaningful, even when those choices fuck with your plans. One of the best endings I ever had to a game happened because my players wildly misinterpreted a situation; rather than try to disabuse them of that notion, I decided to simply accept their interpretation as correct and run with it. The result was an ending that had players in tears. Big dramatic character deaths, defiant last stands, moments of sacrifice that resolved campaign long personal arcs. All of that would have been for nothing if I’d stuck to my guns and told them that the threat they’d been trying to stop was actually a potential ally, as had been my original plan.

Use What the Players Give You

Listen to your players when they talk about their characters. When they bring up backstory, make suggestions, create connections with the world. Weave in those elements into your stories. If you take the things your players connect with and give them value, your players will be more connected to the story. This also comes back to your session zero; when you create characters, encourage your players to think about their connections to the world. Murder hobos are boring. Ask - demand even - that they come up with characters, places, ideals and things that their characters are passionate about. Things that matter to them. Then throw those same things in harms way and watch what happens. I guarantee you’ll get a good story out of it.

Ground Your Players in The Story

The hardest part about running a serious game is that you have to respect that it’s hard on the players too. Humour is easy. Tragedy requires us to be vulnerable. It’s really challenging to put your heart on display in front of a group of people. So your players natural inclination will be to pull back, either by making jokes, or by making their characters too cool, too tough, too unaffected for it all to matter.

There is an incredible power in the words “How do they feel about that?” Ask it often. Start out a session by recapping what happened and then say “How are your characters feeling right now?” Ground your players in their character’s thoughts and feelings, help them and encourage them to engage with the moment. If you feel like a character is reacting in a way that doesn’t make sense or that feels like they’re metagaming instead of flowing with the story, don’t fight them on it, but try instead to explore it with them. If a player says “My character is too hardened and tough to care that those people died,” let them run with that, but encourage them to explore it; What must it feel like to be so dead to the world that watching an entire village get massacred does nothing to them? How harrowing and haunting must it be to carry so many ghosts that a dozen more don’t even move the needle? Respect their choices, but explore those choices. Help them to build out those roleplaying decisions into a fully fleshed out character.

If you’re a GM who loves this about D&D, good for you, have fun.

If you’re a GM who quietly despairs because you want your games to feel serious and meaningful, but your players always turn them into jokes, I want to assure you that there are ways to solve this, but it’s gonna involve making some changes to how you GM.

I’ve run games that have literally made players cry. If you take the time to herd the cats properly, you can get there (If people want specifics I’ll elaborate, but I don’t want to turn this into a soapbox unprompted).

The correct answer to this question is always Outer Wilds.

It’s a game that can be beaten in five minutes if you already know the solution. But the process of discovering that solution, and unearthing the incredible story around it, is one of the most unbelievable gaming experiences you will ever have.

It’s an absolute masterpiece and if you haven’t played it yet, you really, really need to.

FATAL is, somehow, simultaneously a masterclass in realism for the sake of realism, and also the most unrealistic game ever made. There is a specific stat for how many words per minute you can speak, a stat for the longest word you know, and a stat for how far back your earliest memory is. But also, the system uses the concept of “humors” as something that actually has real-world effects, has the aforementioned critical system where you can crit individual organs but leave the surrounding organs unscathed, the ability to roll up a 4 year old with B-cups, and all kinds of other absolutely deranged nonsense that has no business whatsoever calling itself realistic.

Oh, and if your character’s intelligence is low enough, you get to roll to see if they have “R****d Strength”. So that’s great.

I didn’t even get into how the underlying system is abysmally bad even when you try to strip away all the gross shit.

Like, stats are generated by rolling 10d100/10-1. Yes, you read that correctly. Then there are five derived attributes generated as an average of four base stats, so if something modifies a base stat you have to recalculate the derived stat, but then those derived stats also set things like your carry weight, so you have to recalculate that and… It’s exhausting.

Combat is atrocious. There are criticals, but they have no relation to each other, so you can cleave through someone’s appendix and their belly button but leave everything in between untouched. Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly. The whole thing is an ungodly nightmare.

There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.

Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.

By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.

My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.

My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”

Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.

And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.

If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.

Alright, you just sold me on borg backup. Well done.

The answers about using Dockerfiles are absolutely correct, but if you’re looking for a quick and simple solution that will work locally, you can always just use the “commit” docker command. This basically saves the current state of a container as a new image. You can then run new containers from that image as needed.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44480740/how-to-save-a-docker-container-state

Instead you can screw it up by having too many commas or not enough. Hardly that much of an improvement.

Yeah, this is my biggest annoyance with JSON. As a data structure it’s very elegant, but it only really makes sense to people who know how to code, and without the ability to add comments you have to rely heavily on external documentation to make it readable to most users.