“We're calculus dragons. We're totally okay being derivative so long as we still get to remain integral.”
[(−) s0] Iji 1.7??
25 March 2018 17:03Huh! Iji 1.7 was released last year, with a conversion to a new version of Game Maker (I think it says, elsewhere).
Maybe it's time for us to go through that soon?
Well uh
- Are you Irish? No. At least, not in any meaningful sense; I'm not counting the possibility of small-percentage genetic ancestry.
- Do you like Guinness? Never tried it.
- Do you know what the symbol of Ireland is? No, not really. Some poking around on the Web suggests the Irish harp or Celtic harp, but I don't know authoritatively whether that's the symbol, given all the other stuff that symbolizes Ireland? Is there really one that stands above the others?
- Have you ever watched Father Ted? No. I think one of our predecessors might have seen a 30-second clip once which we have no real memory of.
- Do you believe in leprechauns? No, for our values of “not believe” that include “not engage with the idea of”. If any show up then I reserve the right to reconsider.
However, we are still doing some social stuff tomorrow on that day! We'll see how that goes.
[(−) s0] Pi day‽
14 March 2018 13:09The Day of the False Circle Constant is upon us! We must be brave this day and not succumb to the malinstruction of our youth, for after the sun reaches its highest arc in the sky, the True Circle Constant will give its sign once again, at least to those who use the Wobbly Calendar of History (as we must).
And (with some inspiration from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zlatohrbitek) I finally beat the last few challenges last night for the “Ideal DATA WING” achievement! The third challenge of “Chemtrails” (three laps in forty seconds) and the second challenge of “Patterns” (one lap in fourteen seconds) were the last two to fall; the former of those was especially tough.
It's not very long or difficult to get through to the end, and the little storyline's charming: you play as an eponymous Data Wing, a little Asteroids-like ship which apparently can carry a one-byte payload, and it's gradually revealed where you are and what your place is in the world. I liked the graphics style quite a lot, though it might be a bit flashylights/color-aberration for some people. The soundtrack claims to be a vaporwave one, which fits the theme quite well, but I don't know if it's real vaporwave or, like, fake vaporwave, that's some kind of fashionable thing right? I don't want to use the new lingo wrong, right? I wish I could just get the soundtrack but the only links seem to be to some Spotify lists and stuff. Uhh…
The smooth physics and controls are maybe the centerpiece, with the whole “brushing against the walls to move faster” part being also TRON-like, the virtual adversary/role-model other ships, and there's the way you have digital control over—I'm pretty sure it's angular acceleration so what you're often really trying to do is tune the angular acceleration at just the right time (or with a sort of pulse width modulation) to leave your averaged angular velocity in bounds to trace the curve of the wall so you can stay at high speed, since smashing into walls is a major slowdown and all. (“Oh, I failed to hit full speed there.”) You're something like (if I'm perceiving this right) four three integrators away from velocity, and five four integrators away from position—it's a real mental calculus/geometry/indirection squint to get the pattern right!
So yeah! So cool. I think I want to get the shirt at some point.
(Updated an hour later because for some reason I thought angle → acceleration was an integrator when it's actually just trigonometry. Oops.)
[(−) s0] Hrm
31 January 2018 11:53We still really need separate avatars, don't we. We've got temporary ones over on dragon.style due to the higher reliance on avatars, but…
Oh, right, we can replace individual icons retroactively here. Okay, let's just upload these then for now… be a little easier to tell us apart.
Need to get Illum in on this at some point to discuss what we want for permanent ones…
Anything posted here with sensitivity level 2 (Private) must not be repeated or replied to by any less-restrictive channel, as a baseline. Explicit permission overrides this.
To repeat the sensitivity level list from our profile:
- s0: Public. Link/quote freely.
- s1: Unlisted. Use some discretion and don't broadcast too far.
- s2: Private. Ask before repeating things to others.
A “c” (compartment) tag is a hint to be aware that only part of our circle is trusted with enough the right kind of discretion, shared context, or some similar characteristic for things in that compartment. Compartments are tagged using code names; the mapping is defined in this post [s1]. “s1 + compartment” means that the definition of discretion should take the compartment into account, but the content itself is not all that sensitive. “s2 + compartment” is the most restrictive.
The easiest way is to keep everything within the same thread, thus giving it the same visibility as the parent post; if you're reading here, that's the natural thing to do anyway. If you want to take things elsewhere, you have to be much more careful. In particular, Mastodon's visibility model (added: and Twitter's) can lead to surprising and damaging consequences for anything non-public.
Always feel free to ask first (added: privately, of course) if you're not sure.
Places where feedback might be useful:
Currently, we assign compartment access heuristically when inducting people into our access lists, rather than requiring explicit opt-ins, on the grounds that being careful with private-group communication is something people already need to know how to do, and often these people already have a history of being willing to engage on related matters. Dealing with “they don't want to read about that now” is handled using topic tags and cuts. Should we move to requiring explicit opt-ins for everything? If so, should that be applied retroactively?
Suggestions are also invited re making this easier to read/understand/deal with, ideally without: (a) causing the subject line to stretch to infinity, adding verbose preambles which people will get tired of reading, or similar; (b) removing or greatly impeding our ability to show most things to only some people, and different things to different sets of some people; (c) requiring us to impute a bunch of implicit obligation to people (haven't fully unpacked this part); etc. etc.
… anything else that occurs to you, with slightly more caution. Figuring out how to deal with what seems from here to be a reasonable set of social needs, when relevant digital implications have ~no habitual penetration, is an ongoing problem, and there's presumably a lot we can't see.
So we just finally posted our remaining answers to the Q&A bandwagon post. Curiously, the ones that came in from Dreamwidth took longer to answer, but that's because all of you who replied here picked your questions (as opposed to us choosing with an RNG) and you all picked hard ones :-| :-| :-| (I'm not really mad, I'm just amused)
We wound up answering #s 3, 6, 9, 18, and 25; the answers are all over at the original comment thread. Thanks for playing! ^..^
It's on Voiced-Consonant Gears! Or Gaseous Water, if you prefer.
Not getting it yet ourselves, but. Rar.
Do we need to be picking up Opus Magnum? We maybe shouldn't for reasons of time and money, presently (mostly money), but also (a) holy heck the amount of people in our social group who are alchemically inclined and playing it and (b) our second-order predecessor played Codex of Alchemical Engineering and actually did a bunch of little weird things with it and I'm pretty sure based on the source and at least one screenshot we've seen that this is basically the polished version of that.
On a hexagonal grid. A hexagonal grid.
Do we need to pick this up soonish to get in on it and exchange scores with people, or can it wait? Opinions? c..c
Glaaah we don't have time to process this and it's already four days later! Indirectly via siderea: momijizukamori in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_dev is asking about API wishlist items. Get at it quick if you have input!
Woops. Apparently we tagged a few recent entries with a more restrictive label than they should've had. Fixed! c..c
Apparently Trillian for Windows has finally put out a new version that breaks the mostly-unmaintained OTR plugin. A friend of ours (who may reveal themselves if they wish) is trying to get a hold of the author, but does anyone have good alternatives for Jabber+OTR on Windows, meanwhile? (It doesn't affect us directly, but it affects us quite a lot indirectly.)
♪ hmm hm-hm hmm hmm hmm ♪
@desc #1=so wizbit. much administrative. wow
Can you guess why? Guesses in comments if you want to. (It's a patched ProtoMUCK.)
*flip two coins…*
(−) Yay, primary front today. At least… kinda-yay?
(+) Aww, fine.
(−) Now I get to be nervous about All The Things today, like whether that colleague will respond favorably to the things we were nervous about sending last night and whether we'll have been Wrong about stuff and. Aaaaa
(+) I'll help, though! Aaaaa
*run around in circles for a bit before going back for a nap because of spurious early wake today*