Kerbal Space Program was once afflicted by a bug the fans dubbed the “Deep Space Kraken”, whereby if you travelled far enough from the origin of the game’s coordinate system, floating point rounding errors would cause your spacecraft’s components to become misaligned and/or clip into each other, resulting in the craft falling apart or exploding for no obvious reason.
The bug was later fixed by defining the active spacecraft itself as the origin of the game’s coordinate system. In effect, the spacecraft no longer moves; instead, the spacecraft remains stationary and the entire universe moves around it. Owing to how relativity works, to the player this is indistinguishable from the spacecraft moving about within a fixed coordinate system, and it ensures that the body of the craft and its components will always be modelled with maximal precision.
While elegant, this solution introduced a new problem: it was now possible, by doing certain stupid tricks with relativistic velocities, to introduce floating point rounding errors to everything except the active spacecraft. In extreme cases, this could result in the destruction of the entire observable universe.
Some might call this one of those situations where the solution proves to be worse than the problem. I call it a perfect expression of what Kerbal Space Program is truly about.
I know generations are centered around consoles, but if play games on PC or a handheld was your first system, then just pick which gen was going on at the time
If you donât play video games then move along
In the arcade. In 1980. With quarters I stole from my fatherâs change jug.
Itâs called âBrittenâs Endgameâ, and itâs about the writing of Death in Venice, and Brittenâs love of Venice. Tomâs grandfather was running the Aldeburgh Festival at the time of his last trip, and the family went with him to Venice.
If you can make it through the music (not to everyoneâs taste), there are some great interviews, and nice memories from Tomâs mum.
The AI issue is what happens when you raise generation after generation of people to not respect the arts. This is what happens when a person who wants to major in theatre, or English lit, or any other creative major gets the response, “And what are you going to do with that?” or “Good luck getting a job!”
You get tech bros who think it’s easy. They don’t know the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a creative endeavor because they were taught to completely disregard that kind of labor. They think they can just code it away.
That’s (one of the reasons) why we’re in this mess.
Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.
I know Ruby. Sheâs a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but donât they know how lovely she is?
I want to make this absolutely clear to kids: children didnât used to be stuck inside the house like you are today. There used to be public places you could hang out. It used to be fairly safe to walk around because trucks werenât designed to kill children. You didnât need a car to go anywhere so kids without a license werenât trapped. There werenât 24/7 cable news networks constantly scaring parents with anecdotes even as crime was at all time lows and the biggest danger comes from adults kids know not strangers.
Itâs easy to ignore old people talking about âthe good olâ daysâ because a lot of the people saying that shit are racist assholes, but the way society treats kids today really is objectively worse than how kids used to be treated. You deserve better, and you should know that better things are possible. We just need to kill the suburbs and for-profit news.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I could go for a bike ride or walk with my sister or friends and we could leave after breakfast and not come back until dinner and our parents werenât worried. We lived on the edge of town, so we could turn left into the woods or turn right and go downtown or go straight and go to a friendâs house in the neighborhood. I went to a park or the community pool or went out for ice cream alone from a young age.
I also regularly walked to and from school alone from as young as first grade (so, about age 6). And Iâm not saying I walked three miles uphill in snow both ways, but I checked a map and it was over half a mile and crossed at least one street that people drive pretty fast on. And that was normal.
