[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Best for what purpose?

There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.

For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

2
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
2
Twitter is Going Great! (twitterisgoinggreat.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

In which Business Genius™ Elon Musk Ox's brilliant Soopah Dupah Business Plan® is documented for future generations to marvel over.

3
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Back in 2017 I stumbled over this on the Chinese crowdfunding site Modian. They were asking for 50,000RMB (~US$7000 today) to translate the FATE Core rulebook into Chinese.

They got over 215,000RMB (~US$30,000).

As a result of this almost all of the then-extent supplements for FATE were translated and published in China. FATE, as a result, is now actually quite a popular game in China: about #3, from eyeballing Taobao. (#1 is Call of Cthulhu, of all games, and #2 is D&D/Pathfinder.)

This is exciting all by itself already, as far as I'm concerned, but even more exciting to me is this:

There is a native ecosystem of FATE world books and adventures that seems to be popping up. (I'm assuming these aren't translations because "Bilibili" isn't a thing outside of China as far as I know, and the other two are about a very Chinese semi-mythical figure that most people outside of China won't have heard of.)

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It's a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.

If you're going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn't filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by ... Or you're going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

No. Just bluntly no.

I did try using Dvorak. I got pretty good at it. After about four months I could finally type as quickly and effectively on Dvorak as I could on QWERTY.

On. One. Computer.

I sit down at a friend's computer or a family member's? Newp. I use a phone or a tablet? Newp. I use a work computer (where I'm not permitted to install my own software)? Newp.

So that's four months of reduced capacity to type, plus having to keep QWERTY in my muscle memory anyway (with the attendant confusion and error rate that causes!) all for ... not really getting much more speed than I was able to do with QWERTY in the first place.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

The OFFICIAL NAME of the Party in English is "The Communist Party of China".

Not "the correct translation". The OFFICIAL NAME.

It follows, incidentally, the same pattern of naming in a whole bunch of other countries. The Communist Party of Canada, not The Canadian Communist Party. The Communist Party of Cuba, not The Cuban Communist Party. The Communist Party of Korea, not the Korean Communist Party. Etc. etc. etc.

But hey, you don't have to believe me. Just go to their official site: http://cpc.people.com.cn/. Then try http://ccp.people.com.cn/ and see where that gets you.

Getting a name correct is the very most basic element that gets you credibility. If you can't do that, anything else you say on the subject is highly suspect.

Consider how much credibility I'd have if I babbled about Germany as "The German Federal Republic" (or, more extremely, translated it like you did and came up with "The Dutch's Land's Federal Republic") or about the USA as "The American United States". Extrapolate.

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Elon Musk's child wants a legal gender change for reasons of gender identity and because he's embarrassed by his father.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Or you could use the proper English initialization from their official English name: Communist Party of China. But hey, why not remain an ignoramus and snark instead?

You seem to have overlooked I actually praised the Communist Party of one of the Chinas in my comment.

I didn't. It's why I told you instead of rolling my eyes and ignoring you.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Here's a little tip for you: If you use "CCP" you're basically identifying yourself as an ignoramus whose opinions on the topic can be safely ignored. After all if you can't get the name of an institution correct, what are the odds that you got things that require genuine knowledge and nuance right?

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Too good not to share! My two favourite scams: Elon Musk and Bitcoin, merged together into a joint scam!

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

In F/OSS circles pre-Github a fork was when there was enough dissatisfaction with a F/OSS project (for many reasons) that people went through the effort of taking the source of a project at a given point and making an entirely new project based on it. Some famous examples of this kind of fork would be the GCC/EGCS fork, the Xemacs/Emacs fork, the DragonflyBSD/FreeBSD fork, the X.org/XFree86/Freedesktop multiway fork, the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork, etc.

In this sense of the term "fork" it's a major watershed event in F/OSS that sometimes shapes the way future projects run. (And sometimes, like the GCC/EGCS thing, one of the branches becomes the "new normal".)

Post-Github, a fork is just what Github calls cloning a repository on their platform within their platform. Any time you look at a project on Github, if you have an account on Github you can "fork" it (in their sense of the term) which basically means you have a cloned snapshot of that project in your account. It's functionally identical to typing "git clone " on your own machine only it's all kept in Github's own ecosystem.

What I find funny about the people protesting the second use as some kind of Github conspiracy is that the alternatives they themselves recommend instead ... do exactly the same thing (but aren't subject to the same conspiracy theorist tripe)! Cognitive dissonance is a HELL of a drug...

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/221845

This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

1
COROS IIa: A Series of Tubes (personaljournal.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In this post I will expand on that underlying construction giving reasons for some of the design decisions, as well as providing some example use cases for this.

12
A humble plan... (mastodon.world)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Protests are all well and good but they're not helping the Ukrainians on the ground. Governments aren't helping Ukrainians on the ground either. Maybe it's time to help them help themselves.

1
COROS II: Blood and Bone (personaljournal.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

With coroutines and their use cases at least reasonably well established, the event queue mechanism of COROS is introduced to tie them up into a convenient architecture.

1
COROS Ia: My Heart Must Go On (personaljournal.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The first piece of COROS explored was the coroutine system, but coroutines are not a well-understood facility in programming circles for some reason. This article builds up some use cases for coroutines and their application in preparation for the next major component of COROS.

5
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Scientists and linguists, working day and night for month after grueling month finally decoded it: "SHUT UP! THEY'RE LISTENING!"

1
COROS I: The Beating Heart (personaljournal.ca)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The first in a series of articles that builds up a coroutine-based RTOS for use primarily in memory-constrained embedded systems. Future articles will expound on other pieces of the RTOS after which the full, production-ready source will be published under my usual choice of the WTFPL2 license.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

"Banned from Twitter" is usually code for "right-wing extremist" IME. I mean look at Gab or Parler and see what's mostly in there.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Apparently, yes. I'm going to have to track some down to try it, but a quick glance over at Taobao says this is instant snack food.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Correction: all those labels I quoted had meaning. Meaning in language is determined by usage, not by fiat. (If you don't agree, I'd ask you to point me to the authority you recognize for language meaning…) In usage outside of very specific technical contexts they have all lost meaning because grandstanders and ignoramuses love to reach for the worst word they used when dismissively labelling someone with whom they disagree.

Why reach for "authoritarian right-winger", after all, when "YOU'RE A LITERAL NAZI!" packs a more solid punch (in their minds)? Why reach for "authoritarian left-winger" when you could screech "TANKIE!" at the top of your lungs?

Terms which become epithets follow this inevitable downhill path: term of the art → symbolic term → epithet → "person with whom I mildly or greatly disagree, along with an annotation of my tribal involvement".

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

You seriously can't fathom the notion of disagreeing respectfully? Of respectful criticism? Really?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

As with most political slurs, while originally having some (albeit often overstated) meaning, "tankie" boils down today to "you person with whom I disagree". C.f. "Nazi" or "SJW" or "MAGAt" or any number of other tribal signalling mechanisms.

Generally I find people who resort to such political slurs prone to using them in place of thoughtful discourse, so upon hearing them used—no matter which political ideology is being slurred thusly—I assume the person using them has nothing valid to say and skip to the next post. As such I advocate strongly for people using them as often as they like. It helps me bypass the chaff that much more quickly.

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ttmrichter

joined 3 years ago