phm's recent activity
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Comment on Tildes Book Club: Discussion topic for Roadside Picnic in ~books
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Comment on Tildes Book Club: Discussion topic for Roadside Picnic in ~books
phm Link ParentFor me, whether the golden sphere grants the wish is not important at all. The point of the ending is that Red realizes that doesn't know what to wish for. The golden sphere can make anything come...For me, whether the golden sphere grants the wish is not important at all. The point of the ending is that Red realizes that doesn't know what to wish for. The golden sphere can make anything come true but all the things he thought he would wish for are petty and insignificant:
All right. The Monkey, Father... Let them pay for everything, may those bastards suffer, let them eat shit like I did... No, that's wrong, Red. That is, it's right, of course, but what does it actually mean? What do I need? These are curses, not thoughts.
Red desperately wants to think of something bigger, something more universal to wish for, but he can't. In the end he fall back to Arthur naive and childish words, even though he knows they are meaningless. The last paragraph of the book:
“I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are — all powerful, all knowing, all understanding — figure it out! Look into my soul, I know — everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want — because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his – HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”
Here is a quote from an interview with Boris Strugatsky from 2000 (Google Translated from http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int_t13.htm):
Boris Strugatsky: I would say that the ending of "Picnic" is a recognition of the impotence of today's man to change anything significant in the surrounding reality. It is so difficult to improve the real world that even if the Golden Sphere existed in the world, it could not help us, because we simply would not be able to formulate our request: after all, we ourselves do not know what the IDEAL world should be like - ideal for all living people.
My interpretation is that the ending is a rejection of the Soviet communist ideology, which was based on the idea that there is one uniform ideal that must satisfy everyone.
For historical context: by the 1970s the Strugatsky brothers had become completely disillusioned with the Soviet system. It is also important to remember that Roadside Picnic was written at same time as The Doomed City, which was so explicitly political and anti-Soviet that they had to keep it secret and unpublished until the late 80s. The subversive ideas in Roadside Picnic were much more subtle, but they are there.
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Comment on Tildes Book Club: Discussion topic for Roadside Picnic in ~books
phm Link ParentI never noticed it before, thanks for pointing this out! It's not a translation issue, and it's not a normal convention in other books, so I think it's definitely a stylistic choice. I am not sure...I never noticed it before, thanks for pointing this out! It's not a translation issue, and it's not a normal convention in other books, so I think it's definitely a stylistic choice. I am not sure if it was planned from the beginning, or the authors decided to switch after the first chapter, but the effect is definitely interesting.
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Comment on Tildes Book Club: Discussion topic for Roadside Picnic in ~books
phm Link ParentThe official Soviet ideology was very much about total gender equality, so the censorship would not have had any ideological issues with a more equal portrayal of gender roles. However, reality...I also suspect the Soviet censors likely would have taken issue with a more egalitarian portrayal of gender roles, so it still might have been a consideration for the authors when writing it. But I am no expert in Soviet era censorship, nor have I read much Soviet-era literature, so I could be completely wrong about all that.
The official Soviet ideology was very much about total gender equality, so the censorship would not have had any ideological issues with a more equal portrayal of gender roles. However, reality did not quite live up to the ideology, just like the rest of communism. Society was almost entirely male-dominated, women had to do all the housework (in addition to working in the factories), there were double standards, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Russia#Feminism_in_Soviet_society for a brief summary.
The Strugatsky brothers' views and experience with women were typical for their society. While their books were progressive and subversive in pointing out flaws in the Soviet political system, I don't think they ever even realized gender issues existed. In that regard, their books are not much different than most of the American sci-fi classics.
I've also read a lot of old sci-fi and I'm fairly used to it, but I had a similar reaction as the original commenter after rereading Frederik Pohl's Gateway recently. When I read it as a kid years ago I didn't notice all the sexism in it, but today it makes me cringe. It was still an interesting book, but I had to read through some unpleasant parts to get there. I think that's unavoidable; when reading the classics, you have to read around the parts that don't work any more and focus on the ideas that are still relevant.
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Comment on A dialog in Real Time Strategy - The early years of competition between Blizzard and Westwood in ~games
phm LinkI'm a huge fan of the early real time strategy games, and I still play them occasionally to this day. I recently introduced my 7-year old to Dune 2 and he had a great time playing it. It might not...I'm a huge fan of the early real time strategy games, and I still play them occasionally to this day. I recently introduced my 7-year old to Dune 2 and he had a great time playing it. It might not be as a good of a game as the more polished later games of the genre, but the simplicity of the mechanics and the small number of units makes it well suited for a little kid. We moved on to playing Warcraft II in multiplayer mode, which is great fun as long as I don't win too often.
Thinking back to the 90s, my first (pre-Internet) multiplayer game experience was playing Warcraft with a friend from school over a direct modem-to-modem connection. I would call my friend on the phone, ask him to start the game and then end the call. He would start Warcraft in a host mode, where his computer waited for an incoming call, and I would launch Warcraft on my computer and tell it to dial my friend's phone number to connect. It was a pretty involved process, but the ability to play a game remotely was a new and exciting experience.
I also want to want to point out that Jimmy Maher's filfre.net website is an amazing resource. It's truly an example of the best of the Internet: a long-running website created by someone who really, really cares about the subject. I often think about it and other similar sites whenever I start feeling discouraged by the direction of the rest of the web, and it gives me some hope.
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Comment on Quote-only orphan comments: useful context or noisy clutter? in ~tildes
phm Link ParentI would like to see the article summaries and submitter's thoughts in link posts included on the front page, just like we do it for text topics. It you split them into a separate comment, then...I would like to see the article summaries and submitter's thoughts in link posts included on the front page, just like we do it for text topics. It you split them into a separate comment, then they are not part of the post and they don't show up on the front page.
I get that there is a worry that the submitter's summary or thoughts might be of poor quality and make people not upvote the post, but in that case somebody else can make a different post with a better take on the same article and get more votes on the front page. However, this is exactly what Deimos' was saying that he doesn't want.
I think the difference is whether you want the front page to be a collection of links, with people's thoughts about them relegated to the comment page, or you want the front page to be a collection of people's thoughts and commentary on articles, with the links being secondary. The first option is a link aggregator, the second option works more like a blog post aggregator. Tildes is obviously a link aggregator and I respect it for what it is.
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Comment on Quote-only orphan comments: useful context or noisy clutter? in ~tildes
phm LinkThere have been quite a few past discussions on this: 2018: What do you think about having a "submission statement" or something for link based posts? 2018: Do we really need to add summaries to...- Exemplary
There have been quite a few past discussions on this:
- 2018: What do you think about having a "submission statement" or something for link based posts?
- 2018: Do we really need to add summaries to posted articles?
- 2019: Beyond headlines?
- 2020: I’d like to suggest avoiding long excerpts
On including submitter's thoughts in link posts: The natural place to put article excerpts, summaries or the submitter's thoughts on the article is in the post itself - that's how posts work on most blogs and and other discussion sites. But on Tildes, link posts can't include text, and any text by the submitter is posted as a comment underneath. Here is an important comment by Deimos that explains why that is:
If you combine the submitter's thoughts into the topic, it causes issues related to them being linked. If someone posts a great article along with a terrible comment, you force people to vote on both of them as a unit. They can't support the content itself without also seeming to support whatever the submitter said about it. It effectively guarantees the submitter's comment will always have similar exposure as a pinned/stickied comment on everything they post, and there's no reason they deserve that just because they were the one that posted the link.
Top-level comments also become a mix of ones that are commenting on the content and ones that are replying to the submitter, splitting something that should have been a single thread into a bunch of separate ones.
This is Deimos' view, so the site is unlikely to change. But I'm personally more interested in what the submitter says about a link than the link itself. There are many other places on the Internet where you can get a feed of daily links to click on. For me the value of Tildes is not in the links to external content, but the discussion by the users of the site.
I would like to encourage submitters to highlight the part of the article that was most interesting to them and post some thoughts about it to start the discussion. This makes it more likely that other people will comment in response and that the original poster will remain engaged in the discussion. The current design doesn't prevent this, but it also doesn't encourage it, so many posts end up just being links.
On article excerpts: There is a separate discussion about whether people should post article excerpts at all. Some tildezens feel that this discourages people from reading the article before commenting. This is true, but it ignores the fact that many more people read the discussion without commenting on it. For all those readers, an article summary would be very helpful to provide some background to the discussion without requiring the user to open external links.
Another reason for encouraging article excerpts (or even better, summaries) is that often it's hard to tell if a link is worth opening just from the title. For example, yesterday there was a post with a title Reforming the free software message. This is a topic I am interested in, but I have also read a lot on this subject over many years. There's nothing in the title to tell me "Is there actually something new here? Is it worth spending the time to read the full article?" I would prefer scrolling through a list of articles with short summaries (similar to Slashdot's front page) and clicking on the one that interests me rather than seeing a list of headlines with no additional information.
I would advocate for encouraging article summaries in link posts and including them in the post itself rather than as comments underneath.
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Comment on Brutal video shows Ukrainian commando unit blitzing Russian trench in ~news
phm Link ParentWhen I was 20 I also thought like the parent comment's author, so I think I understand where they are coming from. I was young and nobody depended on me, wars were something out of the history...- Exemplary
When I was 20 I also thought like the parent comment's author, so I think I understand where they are coming from. I was young and nobody depended on me, wars were something out of the history books that could never happen again, the cold war had ended and we were literally living in the End Of History. I definitely would not have fought for anything at that point.
But the world has changed a lot since then, and I've changed with it. It turned out Fukuyama was wrong, the wheel of history kept turning and and the Western values were far from universally accepted. I'm still saddened that Russia did not follow up on renouncing their past and integrating with the West - there was a brief window of opportunity for that in the 90s, but it passed quickly. Defending our societies and values today is just as challenging as ever, and the Ukrainians are doing it for all of us right now.
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Comment on Brutal video shows Ukrainian commando unit blitzing Russian trench in ~news
phm Link ParentFrom a very narrow individual point of view, you're right - there is no point in giving up your life for an abstract idea like patriotism if you're not going to be alive to benefit from it...From a very narrow individual point of view, you're right - there is no point in giving up your life for an abstract idea like patriotism if you're not going to be alive to benefit from it afterwards.
But people are more than just individuals with no consideration for anything outside their own life. A country is not an external entity that is irrelevant to your life, a country is made of your children, your family, your neighbors, your community and culture. Protecting the people you care about and your way of life is a very powerful motivator to fight. Especially in the case of Ukraine, watching towns being reduced to rubble and missiles landing in your city makes patriotism a lot less of an abstract concept.
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Comment on Intermediate turn based strategy games in ~games
phm Link ParentI haven't tried it on Linux myself, but people on the GOG forums reported that it runs just fine under Wine. Good luck!I haven't tried it on Linux myself, but people on the GOG forums reported that it runs just fine under Wine. Good luck!
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Comment on Intermediate turn based strategy games in ~games
phm LinkFinally, a chance to talk about Moonbase Commander, one of my favorite games that few people ever played! Backstory Moonbase Commander is a 2002 RTS game from a very unlikely developer, Humongous...Finally, a chance to talk about Moonbase Commander, one of my favorite games that few people ever played!
Backstory
Moonbase Commander is a 2002 RTS game from a very unlikely developer, Humongous Entertainment. They were founded by former LucasArts developers, included Ron Gilbert, the creator of Monkey Island. Humongous was well-known for developing point-and-click games for little kids (Putt-Putt, Freddie Fish, Pajama Sam), which are still playable in ScummVM and a lot of fun if you're a five-year old.
Moonbase Commander
In 2001, they developed a unique game that was a complete departure from their previous releases. Moonbase Commander was a turn-based tactical RTS with ballistics-based mechanics similar to Scorched Earth or Worms. The turn-based nature of the game made it similar to chess: you had to plan your moves in advance and balance tactical vs positional play.
Unfortunately, the game was a complete commercial failure, winning ign.com's Best of 2002: The Game No One Played award.
Mechanics and gameplay
On the surface, the game is simple - there are a few types of structures and a small number of weapons, but the game is exquisitely well-balanced. Every single weapon or tactic in the game has a defense, yet every defense is vulnerable to another weapon or tactic. For example, launching a simple bomb can be countered by deploying an anti-air unit. But the anti-air unit can launch only one missile at a time and is disabled on the next turn, so it can be defeated by one bomb followed up by a second bomb the next turn. The counter to that is to deploy a second anti-air, but that could be countered by using a cluster bomb that separated in three pieces. The counter to that is to deploy four anti-airs, but then you start running out of space to place structures.
The ballistics-based mechanics made a big difference in the feel of the game. Instead of simply pointing to the location where you wanted to build a new structure or attack, you had to point a launcher in the desired direction, hold the mouse button until you reach the desired launch power and release. If you calculated your angle wrong, or held the button too long, the new structure would be placed in the wrong location or collide with an existing structure and explode. This added an element of physical skill to an otherwise boring chess-like-game; a small change with a huge impact on multiplayer games. There were many games where I was certain I was losing, until the opponent failed to make a crucial shot. Similarly, you could come up with a sequence of very hard to pull-off moves that would turn the game around if you could execute them flawlessly.
Playing Moonbase Commander today
Moonbase Commander is available on GOG and Steam, or you can download the original iso from the Internet Archive. It has a single-player mode with computer-controlled opponents and a series of challanges, which is very helpful for learning the game. But the best way to play is against another human player, if you can find another person to play with (which is very unlikely). The game originally supported only LAN-based multiplayer, but it was extended to support Internet play with a third-party utility called Moonbase Console.
Resources
- YouTube gameplay videos
- Moonbase Console - Open-source utility for generating random maps and enabling multiplayer over the Internet
- Unofficial website and unit guide
- Zauron's Complete Guide to Moonbase Commander
- 2002 review from ign.com
- Man In The Moonbase: The Death and Life of the Best Game You Never Played - A retrospective on Humungous Entertainment and Moonbase Commander from 2015
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Comment on Does Tildes need a new icon? in ~tildes
phm (edited )Link ParentPure text all the way! But the name of the site is Tildes, plural. A single tilde symbol is not enough. I put forth the following Unicode symbols to consider for the gopher:// version of the site:...Pure text all the way! But the name of the site is Tildes, plural. A single tilde symbol is not enough. I put forth the following Unicode symbols to consider for the gopher:// version of the site:
≈Tildes
U-2248 (ALMOST EQUAL TO)
≋Tildes
U-224B (TRIPPLE TILDES)
≊Tildes
U-224A (ALMOST EQUAL OR EQUAL TO)
≉ Tildes
U-2249 (NOT ALMOST EQUAL TO), ITALICIZED TEXT
I'm partial to the last one, the forward slash reminds me of a URL.
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Comment on Why doesn't Tildes display a user's social score or karma on their profile page? in ~tildes
phm (edited )LinkThere have been many recent meta threads about Tildes, and I've enjoyed reading the posts from older users because of their perspective on the site's history and culture (I joined in June like...There have been many recent meta threads about Tildes, and I've enjoyed reading the posts from older users because of their perspective on the site's history and culture (I joined in June like many of you). It's been helpful to know "Is this post by someone who's been here for years, or someone who joined last week?". The only way to know that is that is click on their user profile or remember their name from older discussions.
I would like to see the year a user joined displayed next to a user's posts.
If the number of groups grows and they eventually become opt-in, it might be even better to display the year when the user joined that particular group instead of when they joined Tildes.
The age of the account is a fixed metric that cannot be gamed (other than by purchasing or hacking old accounts), so it doesn't have the downsides of measuring karma or engagement. It would enable people to take the age and experience of the poster into account when reading posts, which could be good or bad depending on situation. What do you think?
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Comment on Experiences with emotions (do you feel them often, and how to feel more emotions?) in ~talk
phm Link ParentThank you, I will check out the podcast! This is good advice that can probably be applied to many adult situations as well.Thank you, I will check out the podcast! This is good advice that can probably be applied to many adult situations as well.
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Comment on Formula 1 race weekend (Canadian GP) thread in ~sports.motorsports
phm Link ParentThanks for all the detailed info! I bookmarked your post so I have it as a reference if I end up going to Montreal next year. If I see someone with a 1 year old with humungous ear protection...Thanks for all the detailed info! I bookmarked your post so I have it as a reference if I end up going to Montreal next year. If I see someone with a 1 year old with humungous ear protection muffs, I'll say hi :-)
I didn't think about this until just now, but the Canadian GP should be pretty exciting in person this year with Lance actually having a decent chance to fight close to the front and justify the name of the grandstand. I was always an underdog fan so I'm all in on Alonso and Aston this year. I feel your pain about Ferrari though.
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Comment on Formula 1 race weekend (Canadian GP) thread in ~sports.motorsports
phm Link ParentCongratulations on your baby! Getting my (slightly older) kid to join me in watching F1 on the weekends has been a great experience for us. I followed F1 for a few years in the 90s, and got back...Congratulations on your baby! Getting my (slightly older) kid to join me in watching F1 on the weekends has been a great experience for us.
I followed F1 for a few years in the 90s, and got back into it in 2018 when F1TV launched. I have thought about going to a race, but I wasn't sure how the live experience compares to watching it at home.
Getting to walk through the starting lane while the cars and drivers are getting ready would be very exciting, but I assume that's not the typical experience. It looks like on most tracks you get a view of one section of the track, with cars continuously zooming past, which doesn't seem that exciting if you don't know what's going on the rest of the track. Do they have big video walls showing the feed from the rest of the track, with onboards and replays? Do people listen to commentary on their phones? Are there interesting things to do before or after the race?
For those of you who have been to Montreal (or another race), how was it?
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Comment on Experiences with emotions (do you feel them often, and how to feel more emotions?) in ~talk
phm LinkIt's interesting that after many years of reading Internet forums from Slashdot to Reddit and never posting, this thread finally got me to share my thoughts and experiences. I don't know if it's...It's interesting that after many years of reading Internet forums from Slashdot to Reddit and never posting, this thread finally got me to share my thoughts and experiences. I don't know if it's because the topic resonated, or because the Tildes environment gives me more comfort with sharing.
I'm mostly comfortable with the level of emotions I experience, but they do seem flatter than many other people's. I feel joy from accomplishments, happiness from relating to my partner or being around trees. But these emotions are not very strong, they are more of a background than a focus of my experience. I see other people get upset or angry, and escalate their emotional engagement quickly, while I usually react to setbacks with annoyance rather than anger, and focus on trying to think myself out of the problem.
I never really considered this to be a problem, but recently I've been worried about how to emotionally connect with my 7-year old kid. He seems to experience emotions more frequently and strongly than what I'm used to - all his emotional responses, from excitement and joy to anger come quickly and with great intensity. While I don't mind the joy, the anger worries me. For me anger is rare, with a slow buildup, and usually lasts a multiple days during which I'm focusing on whatever is making me angry; he gets angry very quickly when facing setbacks, but then it dissipates just as quickly. I know that as a parent I need to show empathy and support him in whatever emotions he is feeling, but that's hard to do when my first feeling is "There's no reason to get angry over this trivial thing". But you can't parent by telling kids their feelings are invalid and I'm not sure what how to do it.
I started writing a brief summary, but Ursula LeGuin's foreword to the book already had a far better description:
Even though the book was written before Chernobyl, its description of the Zone almost perfectly matches the Chernobyl exclusion zone: a decaying post-apocalyptic industrial area full of invisible dangers and mutilated nature. The developers of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game combined the two to great effect.