early_riser
@early_riser@lemmy.world
- Comment on Lots of different aliens probably see rainbows. 1 week ago:
Thanks 😀
There’s a wiki if you’re curious, though it’s not as organized as it probably should be.
- Comment on The artificial gravity generators never seem to get destroyed in space battles. 1 week ago:
- Comment on The artificial gravity generators never seem to get destroyed in space battles. 1 week ago:
Doylist explanation: it would be too expensive for the FX department.
As it happens, the same worldbuilding project I mentioned in another post here sort of addresses this. The same aliens mentioned there don’t use artificial gravity at all. Being arboreal creatures they’re well suited to microgravity and can happily live permanently in zero G. Upon meeting humans and learning that we want artificial gravity (specifically centrifugal gravity), they wonder why we spent all the effort to get away from gravity only to spend even more effort to bring it back.
Since human orbital colonies take the form of O’Neil cylinders, you can cut off the gravity by halting the cylinder’s rotation. If stopped abruptly enough this would cause a lot of damage initially as objects go flying. It would also put the terrestrial, bipedal humans at a disadvantage compared to the aliens with five prehensile extremities.
- Comment on The artificial gravity generators never seem to get destroyed in space battles. 1 week ago:
Someone has spent a lot of time on Linux forums
- Comment on Lots of different aliens probably see rainbows. 1 week ago:
Are you ready for some stupid lore? Cuz here’s a stupid lore dump!
I’m working on a worldbuilding project (which I post about on !worldbuilding@lemmy.world that involves aliens with a visual system that works very differently from humans.
They can see a much wider range of wavelengths than humans, from 12 micrometers up to UV-A. That’s a lot! The catch is they can’t see it all at once. Their eyes work more like radio receivers than cameras, and they have to “tune around” to different spectra in order to see the whole thing.
While they have subjective experiences similar to what humans call “color”, the color of objects is not fixed, and changes as their visual passband changes. If they tune away from an objects strongest reflected wavelength, it will appear black or gray. They’re neurologically incapable of conceiving of color as an independent quale separate from objects so colored, and their languages rely on analogies to familiar objects to describe colors rather than using words that describe the independent experience of color.
- Comment on What's your opinion on post-game content? do you do it? or are you done with the game when the credits roll? 1 week ago:
Been sitting on this one for over a year. I really enjoyed Tunic, and it seems Outer Wilds is a similar experience, relying on the player not knowing what’s coming.
- Submitted 1 week ago to games@lemmy.world | 36 comments
- Comment on Water is just molten rusted hydrogen 1 week ago:
another quintessential shower thought. I approve.
- Comment on Whales ARE fish 1 week ago:
I had a whole deleted other paragraph in the OP about how everyday language isn’t beholden to strict scientific nomenclature, in which I mention tomatoes specifically. A chef probably doesn’t care about the exact botanical definition of “fruit”, and is more concerned that tomatoes pair well with savory foods like other vegetables do, so forcing the distinction in this case would only confuse things.
I know I’m also undercutting my own joke, but calling whales (and humans) “fish” in the cladistic sense, while true, is also not very helpful.
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 15 comments
- Comment on The internet seems to despise both the role of "Parents" and "Children"... 1 week ago:
In fairness those could be two different groups of people.
I’m not interested in having kids myself, and of course if other people feel the same that’s OK, but a lot of people don’t want other people to have kids, period. If someone wants to have 10 kids, go ahead, as long as I don’t have to babysit 😀
- Submitted 1 week ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 17 comments
- Comment on 1 week ago:
“fighting the medium” is an excellent phrase! Never played Firewatch, though I have made some stumbling attempts at creative writing, and it’s made me realize that certain things are very difficult to convey organically in words. How do you get across to a first time reader that an alien isn’t actually shrugging or winking or pointing with an index finger, but expressing the same thing through non human body language? And then how do you do it over and over and over again, because when posting stories to a forum you have to assume this is everyone’s first time reading.
In a visual medium like a webcomic, it’s super simple to convey it through a combo of dialogue and visuals. Even the nature of the story itself has to fit the medium. With a comic, people expect short self-contained scenes or character interactions that may or may not connect to form a story arc. This is what I like to write about, little snippets that serve to build the world, just a few lines of dialogue or a paragraph describing a scene, but that’s not what people expect from prose. They want meatier stuff.
Makes me wonder what would be impossible to express altogether in one medium vs another.
- Comment on It would be crazy if someone died of a heart attack while crowd surfing and hundreds of people just unwittingly pushed a corpse around. 1 week ago:
It was probably the best way she could have gone. She was 13. Her health had been a roller coaster for a few months. She had refused her breakfast that morning, and I knew by the end of that day she’d either be gone or we’d have a date set. I was able to take the day off work to be with her. She was my retired guide dog. My supervisor and coworkers had seen and interacted with her before her retirement, and that made the situation more concrete for them.
She ate a bit of lunch around noon, and I spent quite a while next to her on the floor listening to her breathe. She even seemed to perk up an hour or so before the vet appointment. I was nervously eating a bag of chips and she snapped the crumbs that fell to the floor as quick as ever. She got in the van fine and trotted into the waiting room. We sat down and I swear she looked around, said “Welp, now’s a good a time as any”, and gave up the ghost. I was obviously devastated but also relieved that she saved me from having to make the hard decision.
- Comment on It would be crazy if someone died of a heart attack while crowd surfing and hundreds of people just unwittingly pushed a corpse around. 1 week ago:
I expect a bit of that here. /r/showerthoughts had its fair share of them, but Lemmy being Lemmy, they’re a lot more frequent, a lot less subtle, and express a narrower range of perspectives.
At least they’re observations in the vein of actual showerthoughts. The politics usually shows up in a very non organic way.
A post about the Israeli Palestinian conflict in an unrelated community
- Comment on It would be crazy if someone died of a heart attack while crowd surfing and hundreds of people just unwittingly pushed a corpse around. 2 weeks ago:
I can speak to this, though with a dog rather than a human. She lost control of her bowels and bladder when she went. I feel for the dude next to me in the waiting room at the vet. He was probably there to get shots for his cat or something and wasn’t expecting a dog to buy the farm right there.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on It would be crazy if someone died of a heart attack while crowd surfing and hundreds of people just unwittingly pushed a corpse around. 2 weeks ago:
Now this is a classic shower thought.
- Comment on I started playing WH40k Rogue Trader and I'm digging it, but I know virtually nothing of Warhammer. Any super basic world info I should know going in? 2 weeks ago:
I’m only on the periphery of the fandom, mostly just watch lore videos and play a few video games. The AdMech is my favorite faction. As for how real the machine cult is, it seems to depend heavily on the writer. My personal head canon is that the machine god is an actual warp entity like Isha and the other Eldar gods before Saanesh nommed them. If emotions and beliefs manifest as warp entities, then the Omnissiah should be one regardless of how the AdMech came to believe in it.
- Comment on In Pokemon Red and Blue, you're storing your pokemon in Bill's PC, not Bill's highly available georedundant cloud. One brown out and all your critters are gone. 2 weeks ago:
Now we know where missingno comes from.
- Comment on In Pokemon Red and Blue, you're storing your pokemon in Bill's PC, not Bill's highly available georedundant cloud. One brown out and all your critters are gone. 2 weeks ago:
Correct, because the PCs in the Pokemon centers can communicate with Bill’s PC where your mons are stored. Said communication likely happens over the internet, and since this is 1996 we’re talking about, it’s very possibly not encrypted.
- Comment on Lawn mowers make great but usually impractical fart silencers. 2 weeks ago:
The boom of the fireworks covers the sound and the sulfur smell of the propellant masks the odor. It all makes sense now.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 35 comments
- Comment on Abandoned FOSS projects 2 weeks ago:
I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.
Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to selfhosted@lemmy.world | 11 comments
- Comment on RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More) 2 weeks ago:
IDK, said laptop is from 2010.
- Comment on RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More) 2 weeks ago:
Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.
I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.
- Comment on RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More) 2 weeks ago:
Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually.
- Comment on RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More) 2 weeks ago:
Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.
- Comment on RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More) 2 weeks ago:
I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.
I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.
