Story, Wednesday January 24, 2018

[Story, Wednesday January 24, 2018]

Whoever's running the pot for Van and Tedd being half-siblings, put me down for two cookies.

[Story Friday December 15, 2017]

14 hours ago, Kazzellin said:

Personally, I'm hoping the wide eyes Susan has right after Adrian speaks to her for the first time (in his true form) aren't because she recognizes his voice. Thought that's mainly becuase I don't want him to be her jerk of a father.

She's looking at someone who moments ago looked to be in their sixties or seventies now looking barely older than she is. As much transformation as has been going around, that ought to take a moment to process. That this is Raven's actual form. The fact that he's an elf, and a dashing one at that, can only increase the duration of that necessary moment.

Besides, half-immortals cannot have children.

[NP Friday November 17, 2017]

12 hours ago, Scotty said:

I think in terms of this game, "Ditzy" and "Busty" are both physical traits and so can't both be applied to one player.

Good point. But there could be clothing or animal form that gives same benefits as "Busty". So we might still have a situation with a "Ditzy" character having more than 3 cards to play.

[NP Friday November 17, 2017]

This is precisely the sort of card I was talking about when I said that implementing them on a machine can suck. I already have an FSM that applies cards one at a time with a filter checking for repetitions. This seemed like a good idea based on rules and before seeing all the cards. Now I have to bypass the filter check if "ditzy" tag is set and then do a counter on each successful application of a card to decide what the chance of new card sticking should be. Fortunately, I think this can still work with cards being applied one at a time if I do 100% to stick, 50%, and 33% for each subsequent card. And can a fourth card now be played if player is "ditzy" AND "busty"? Oh well, I can tune all these little things later.

[NP Wednesday October 25, 2017]

24 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I don't care if someone made it, there are only five true dices - d4,d6,d8,d12 and d20 - and it was mathematically proven thousands years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid

Platonic Solids are restricted by symmetries you don't need for fair dice. (Good discussion on Numberphile) There is a very nice regular 120-sided solid. The d30 and d60 are in the same family as that one. More Examples

[NP Wednesday October 25, 2017]

16 minutes ago, Scotty said:

It also hasn't been touched on, but I'm guessing that each player gets a number of cards to start with, and uses them to buy the spaces, and they need the right combination (for the 2 and 3 point spaces) of cards or else they can't buy the space, like they land on one of the corner 3's but only have animal and clothing cards in their hand, they can't buy the space because they don't have a physical card.

With an added caveat, that they might be able to buy a square, but at the cost of assuming a form/clothing combination that would put them at a disadvantage or take away advantage they already have. That seems to be implication about movement and the river/tunnel mechanics, and I'm sure there are other (dis)advantages yet to be revealed. Which is a good game design decision, because it allows tunning the game flow by adjusting how many advantage/disadvantage cards there are, and how they interact with each other. It also introduces considerable amount of strategy in timing the use of cards, rather than pure luck of whether you've drawn cards you needed or not.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

1 hour ago, The Wozard said:

So... Where's the starting square on the board?

Should all players start on the same square? Board has two reflection symmetry. Along the river, and along line perpendicular to it. So any starting position will get reflected to 3 other equivalent points giving you 4 start locations, which matches number of players. If movement is allowed both clock-wise or counter-clock-wise, there are 3 starting arrangements that are 100% "fair". The 4 corners, the 2-point squares adjacent to river, or 2-point squares on sides with no access to river. Corners seem most natural. If movement is allowed in one direction only, I don't think there is an arrangement that mathematically guarantees to give no pair of players advantage over another pair due to rotational symmetry being broken by river, and reflection symmetry by chirality of player movement.

I have no idea if any of that's relevant, though. The gameplay might be chaotic enough for starting positions not to matter at all. Good question either way.

[Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)]

On 10/23/2017 at 11:21 AM, Vorlonagent said:

Much depends on the behavior of government too.   Elon Musk has a residential solar energy company called Solar City whose profitability is (last I heard) dependent on government solar energy subsidies. (article is a couple years old.  Things could be better or worse now)

If the soon-to-be named Ørsted profits without need for government, that's fantastic.

So this one's a bit complicated. I'm not touching politics of energy production with a ten foot pole, but I can talk about science of it.

First, the good news. Solar prices are plummeting. They are well bellow costs of coal after environmental fees and taxes are applied, and are expected to be bellow costs of coal in countries with no environmental regulations in just a few years. That's a projection based on technologies we are already using. Tech we have in the labs is expected to drop that by another order of magnitude at least, but ETA is uncertain. This is in sharp contrast to situation we had just over a decade ago, when solar barely broke even in terms of energy produced in panel's life time vs energy consumed in production. In early 2000's, if you were using solar power, you were simply exporting pollution to China. It was still profitable in some regions due to environmental regulations and subsidies, but it wasn't really green. Today's solar is. It's green, cheap, and it's going to completely dominate the market with government's support or without.

But it's going to be a slow road, especially without subsidies. The reason is that sun refuses to shine 24/7. Good for life on earth, bad for solar power. While total peak power consumption falls on the day-time, the night-time consumption is considerable, especially in colder climate where people use electricity or fossil fuels not to freeze. There is also great variation of solar availability by season, weather, and region. Which means that the consumer either has to store energy or have a backup. That means having a battery, having a generator, or being plugged into the power company's grid. This is why profitability of solar still heavily depends on subsidies and laws governing utilities.

Unfortunately, situation with batteries is pretty grim. LiPoly is expensive. There might be a few replacements coming in (graphene, glass electrolyte) which will be a huge improvement, but still not nearly enough. And that's already pushing electrochemistry to its limits. We might get lucky with nuclear isomer breakthrough, but in best case scenario, that tech is decades out. In many parts of the world, having a home battery just isn't going to cut it. (Although, in sunnier, warmer parts of the world, it totally will!) Most of us will have to still rely on power companies absorbing a lot of the difference. The most likely way they'll go with it is synthetic fuels used for storage. Methane is probably the best bet, as it can be burnt on existing gas turbines. But hydrogen's viable too. These technologies will still be carbon-neutral, but they'll be way more expensive than direct solar, which means that we'll still have to pay our electric bills. And the worst part is that it will take a while to build out the necessary infrastructure.

Not all is grim, though. Even if households will take some time to become near-100% renewable-powered, we have lots of industries and transit that rely on fossil fuels primarily during daylight hours. And that's a huge chunk of our carbon footprint that will be completely eliminated in the next couple of decades simply because it will be way cheaper for corporations to use solar power. This process has already begun. I'm sure, we'll be able to celebrate peak carbon before next decade is out. Whether that's soon enough remains to be seen.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

15 hours ago, mlooney said:

Just because you aren't trying to make money off of it doesn't make it fair use. You know what makes if fair use? A judge saying it is.

Your case law is out of date. According to Ninth Circuit, Fair Use is an expressed right, and an exception to exclusive rights granted by copyright. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015) Modern copyright law actually requires copyright holder to have a reason to believe that Fair Use does not apply prior to asserting copyright. And the proposed work is non-commercial, transformative, and does not diminish source material. These are the criteria for Fair Use.

Moreover, an implied license exists for derived works, conditional on attribution (e.g. Dan on NSFW edits) Consequently, per Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen (1990) this does constitute a non-exclusive license. I might not be a contracts lawyer, but I work for one. These things rub off.

15 hours ago, mlooney said:

The Dan went out of his way to put that statement in, please respect it.

That's a standard footer. There's one at the bottom of this page. It is by no means going out of someone's way. Going out of someone's way is actually registering copyrighted material with Library of Congress, which by the way, is requirement for actually enforcing the copyright. Albeit, copyright can be registered after infringement has taken place, limiting author's ability to seek damages and attorney fees. No LoC registration under name Dan Shive exists, making that copyright footer a mere formality with no legal bearing. Again, copyright still exists, even unregistered, but that quoted footing is absolutely meaningless.

But that's an aside. The crux of the matter is that Dan has been supportive of derivative works. The copyright is in every way respected. And if this is to become a thing, I'm sure we'll hear his thoughts on it one way or another. As I've said before, a mere mention from him that he does not approve would be enough for me to drop out of any attempts to make a game like this. But I'm also not going to bug him about permission for something that has less chance of happening than not. Given all of the above, that'd be just rude.

You, however, have absolutely no legal standing in this matter. And I don't think an ethical one either, but if you'd like to debate ethics of it further, feel free to PM me. I'm done derailing this thread.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

Non-monetized derivative, using only a small portion of the original material (rules, few characters), that attributes and does not diminish the original work. This is Fair Use under US law. And yes, if it was just the game, without characters, it wouldn't even need that.

Given that this is meant as a fan-work, not in any way trying to be passed for completely original work, and Dan's past reactions towards fan-generated content in general, I would be comfortable going ahead with this without seeking explicit permission. I wouldn't do this against Dan's will, if it were voiced or if there was any reason to believe it would be voiced, of course, simply out of respect for the world he created.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

1 hour ago, WR...S said:

Of course, the biggest hurdle would be how friggin' hard it is to transform players in our setting....

For a simple game with a skeleton team, honestly, I'd be content with a few drawn/rednered frames of transformation sequence story-book style. The drawback, of course, is that there'd have to be quite a few sequences for various possible pairs of starting and final states, greatly limiting the number of transformations.

A much better way is to deal with vectors, whether in 2D or 3D, and allow for procedural transformations. These will almost always require some additional artist work to handle weird edge cases, but you can greatly increase the number of possibilities and it'd support animations out of the box. I can think of several ways to approach the details, depending on what tools the artist(s) is/are comfortable with. And yes, I recognize that something like that would be a far greater time sink on both the code and art side.

But the great thing here is that it's entirely open ended. You don't have to jump into the deep end of it if the resources aren't there. In fact, it can and should be started with just the board and the gameplay mechanics.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

19 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It might also be lot of work on "getting the rules from Dan" side. Especially if you don't contact him personally.

Rules would have to be adapted to fit the mechanics, anyhow. Trying to use rules designed for a board game in a video game directly is a folly. I know some guys who worked on PC version of MTG. Trying to codify all of the special text on each card was a nightmare, because humans interpret rules very different from machines. Something that has an intuitive resolution in written rules to players is a critical bug waiting to happen when the conditions are just right on a machine. And yes, conflicts occasionally happen even in traditional MTG, but there you can at least argue about the rules, trying to come up with a resolution. When playing a game on PC, no such luxury.

So barring direct intervention from Dan, I would just take the general outline that we're sure to get over the upcoming weeks and take liberties with it to fit the mechanics of the game. I already feel like a lot of transformation mechanics would have to become mini-games, which will fundamentally alter how the game is scored. And that might call for other balance adjustments. I find that entirely acceptable for a fan effort.

Of course, I'm prepared to backtrack on any of the above as this arc progresses. We might get a lot of detail on how the game is played or very little. Some of it might be readily adaptable, and some would require changes. But I would argue that the main purpose of a fan game would be to try and make it fun, even if it has to diverge from in-story rules to do so.

[NP Monday October 23, 2017]

Anybody else suddenly got an urge of turning this into an actual video game? Probably something fairly simple, in the style of early Mario Party games, with board + mini-games (pending future clarifications on rules.) I'm willing to sacrifice my time on code, but this seems like it'd hinge on art, and I'm useless at that. I can roll with 2D or 3D, and it'd be easy enough for me to get a match-making server going, or it can be purely single-player, depending on how much interest there is in turning it into something.

(Industry experience, two shipped titles, past work at Google in machine vision. I'm serious about getting the code working, but this is going to be a lot of work on the art side.)

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

Points 1. and 2. are acknowledged. This isn't a discussion about what can and cannot be done with magic, but rather what sort of EGS magic is most impressive when contrasted to limitations of real world.

And yeah, you could replace internal human anatomy and metabolism with another mammal's, keeping in mind that you'll be forced to adjust some proportions. But even then, on the extreme end of 1/7th scale, it's not clear what to do about the cerebral cortex. There are animals with somewhat higher neuron density, but not by a factor of 343 we are talking about here.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

Thermodynamics is statistical. And rules of statistics are easily broken with a time machine. There are some other interesting ways of completely bypassing some thermodynamics limitations in QM. Without getting into details, suffice it to say, that superconductors and superfluids ought to be thermodynamically impossible. Consequently, things like flight, element manipulation, and shape-shifting while preserving volume, are all relatively straight forward. Primarily because they aren't impossible under our laws of physics. Merely very, very unlikely. And breaking fundamental rules is very different from stacking the odds. That's basically what QM is for.

54 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Heavier is obviously opposite of what we want to accomplish. But let's try the temperature: wouldn't the change of temperature be compensated by what we did with electrons?

No, it would not. Because we have all the different kinds of bonds to balance. Different attractive forces between particles have different scaling with elementary charge and distance. And you have to adjust elementary charge and Plank's constant just to get the correct atom size and correct energy difference between excitation levels. So you are already locked into a very specific reduction of elementary charge just to keep the individual atoms working the way they did. And then you simply don't have anything there to make sure the relative strengths of covalent bonds and hydrogen bonds is correct for the temperature ranges you had to choose to keep diffusion rates low. An example of not getting these right would be air liquifying in shrunk person's lungs because reduction of intermolecular attraction was insufficient to compensate for reduction in temperature.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Diffusion works by gravitation? I though gravitation is hardly affecting anything on this scales. Bigger, yes, smaller, yes, but not this scales.

No, it has to do with kinetic energy. Equipartition Theorem of thermodynamics tells us that equal amount of energy is going to go into each degree of freedom. So the average velocity of a particle just bouncing around is related to temperature via mv² = kT. Consequently, at any given temperature, lighter particles move faster than heavier ones. So in order to reduce the distance a particle travels on average via diffusion, to compensate for smaller size, you'd have to make all the particles heavier. This is on top of increase on density due to condensing the object. Alternatively, you could reduce temperature. But then we're back to having to adjust all of chemistry, because now the barriers are wrong.

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Still, no. While there are multiple equivalent ways to formulate any physical laws, they may not be equivalent from the POV of magic breaking/bending some of them.

Sure, but this is sort of what I'm talking about, and it goes for the other points. At some point, we must say "it's just magic," and we don't know for sure if something is going to be easier or harder for magic. But while a lot of the magic used in EGS is the sort of thing that just gently bends a few rules, and in many cases could easily be replicated with sufficiently advanced technology, size altering magic breaks a lot of very fundamental rules. Which is why it has my first pick for, "Magic that makes physicists cry," among all the odd things going on in EGS universe.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

Diffusion rate depends only on mass of the particles, not interaction. If you scale particles down, diffusion rates will not scale down, meaning you will have faster diffusion in proportion to the body. That breaks a lot of crucial processes, like neurotransmission and energy production in mitochondria. You might get away with adjusting masses of particles, but that feedbacks into quantum again. Your electron shells will be different now, and all of chemistry is broken. We are back full circle to needing to adjust all of the parameters at once, with more constraints than there are variables.

Gravity due to curvature is consequence of gauge invariance under Poincare group. If you disable that, you disable electroweak forces, which are result of gauge invariance under U(1)xSU(2), and strong nuclear forces, which are due to gauge invariance under SU(3). Light itself could no pass through the region in question, since it's a gauge boson. Waving this away with, "It's magic" is pointless when we got this far, since we should either do that from the start, or not at all. If we are relying on physics to tell us how this works, our options are either accepting extreme gravitational forces, or complete breakdown of all of physics. Former seems less scary.

Quantum Gravity won't save you here. Everything we are talking about is above Plank Scale, where mean field approximation to quantum gravity works. In mean field QG, gravity works essentially the same way as it does in GR. This is also something I can talk about at great length, but really doesn't fit into the discussion here.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

30 minutes ago, ijuin said:

The undesirable attraction and tidal stress from space-bending can be counteracted by incorporating negative-mass.

Gravity is curvature. If you get rid of gravity, you get rid of curvature. Yes, you can add a bunch of energy, resulting in curvature, then compensate with negative energy to flatten it out, and now you're back to boring old flat space-time with no advantage to scaling things.

I'm not concerned about the source of the curvature. Although, it's trivially related to Stress Energy Tensor via Einstein Field Equations. The fundamental problem is that by changing relative scales, you inherently produce a region where metric is not flat. It's like taking a rod and trying to get one end to run North-South, and the other East-West. You can do it, but you'll have to bend the rod somewhere. You can have a sharp bend that's localized, or a gentle curve distributed from one end of the rod to the other. But there has to be net curvature. Scale works the same way. You can have space shrunk around an object you want to be smaller, but then between that object and everything you don't want shrunk, you have to contain a given amount of curvature. That curvature, inherently, results in an accelerated frame, which is guaranteed to have following consequences: 1) Gravitational force pushing everything away from the shrunk object, 2) Severe blue shift associated with the same. Time acceleration is another likely side effect. You can entirely remove that feature from the metric, but then you're likely building a time machine. (Via a few boosts, which would then imply negative mass being involved.)

Now, the tidal forces will depend on how you distribute the curvature, but since you don't have much room to work with, you are pretty much guaranteed regions of extreme compression and extreme spaghettification. In other words, really bad time for anything crossing the boundary.

The great thing about General Relativity is that all of these things are easily computable, if you don't mind a bit of tensor algebra, and even most of that can be avoided if you just want a rough ballpark figure, and don't mind treating this as a 1 + 1 dimensional problem. (Radial + time.) But even without crunching numbers, we are talking warp drive energies and warp drive in atmosphere kind of consequences.

 

Ahem, sorry. My education was in particle physics, so I can babble about relativity at length. I probably shouldn't derail the thread even further, though. Feel free to ping me in a PM, though.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

But this problem disappears if instead of magic "ending" after shrinking there is actually some magic field which stays in place and converts particles between big and small version, or in case of something bigger, wrap it into the field and convert it gradually later (this is happening with food). Only problem is that you effectively have different values of physical contacts inside the field and outside, which sounds very similar to what Raven describes as spicy magic.

While this is potentially workable, and might actually be the least problematic option overall, you at very least completely messed up diffusion rates, which are crucial for all kinds of regulatory processes. Neurotransmission is just one example. I'm not sure if making atoms that are smaller, but react the same, and diffuse the same can actually be solved exactly. Given interactions between all kinds of particles, you have more constraints than variables. Given dimension of the problem, you could probably get "close" to satisfying all restrictions despite the problem being over-constrained, but just how close is close enough for a living organism? And we haven't even touched quantum yet. I don't know if anything relies on QM in animal cells, but something like this breaks photosynthesis, for example.

6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Another alternative is to use non-euclidean space, similarly as in bag in holding, just not closing it completely. Catalina is actually still as big as normally, but the space is curved so parallel lines which are 3.5 feet apart inside her body are 0.5 feet apart outside. Of course, normally would bending the space so much cause all sort of city-destroying effects (especially considering you might need more curved space than in black hole ... hmmm ... maybe not just city) but so would the mentioned bag of holding, lot of teleports (some work differently but many are supposed to bend space) and any of those magic doors and mirrors which have their ends very distant if in same universe at all. In fact, just in EGS, the shape of universe which takes griffin's half into account would likely be complicated. So, I would assume that it's proven that magic CAN bend space without gravitation-based sideefects.

This is why I brought General Relativity and gravity earlier. You can't have space-time curvature without generating gravitational forces as a side effect. And that's the direct reflection of the fact that the underlying invariant is the distance. Once you start messing with sizes, and consequently distances between things, all hell breaks loose.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

16 hours ago, A.E. Pessimal said:

Which brings up another important question: Does Catalina now have an itty bitty phone? And can she make calls with it?

Going off from physics, no. Antenna is now entirely too short to pick up the cell band. They are cutting it close as it is with modern phones. But then again, going off from physics, Catalina's metabolism should now be incompatible with survival. So we're knee-deep in "it's magic" territory. Should a magically shrunk cell phone still magically pick up the cell signal? I'm going to go with, "Yes, but only if it's dramatically appropriate."

Honestly, shrinking magic is the worst in the "making physicists cry" category. You can't just remove a fraction of the matter and have the rest work the same way, because you just broke biochemistry. Nor can you just make matter itself more compact, because you just broke quantum chemistry. And you can't make the space itself more compact, because now you have gravitational tides that are... Holly Hawking Radiation, the whole building is coming down! And none of it is fixable in any clear way without breaking a whole bunch of other things. Size is surprisingly fundamental. All of relativity rests on its invariance. And if you dig deep enough, so does a big chunk of quantum field theory. It's gauges all the way down. Compared to that, silly things like flight, super strength, morphing, or invisibility are trivial silly things. What's a few statistical anomalies reversing thermodynamics for a bit between friends? These things are very near believable. But if I was given a control over every physical constant with a challenge of making a girl 1/7th scale without killing her or taking out half the city block, I wouldn't know where to start.

So yeah, sticking with "flair for dramatic" as the only sane point of reference for this one.

[NP, Monday October 31, 2016]

Where does Rhoda carry her phone? Wherever that is, should have enough space for Catalina at this size.

This does remind me of a girl I know who used her bra as a place to keep her phone... But given Rhoda's previous internal monologue, I don't think that's going to happen.

[Story, Friday September 16, 2016]

I have to say, if I got to receive a random super-power, and I ended up simply with an ability to make an appearance like that, I would not be entirely disappointed.

[Story, Wednesday August 31, 2016]

3 hours ago, Stature said:

Though the exact notion of genetics is nearly out the window. So Pa Baker is the main (and only) source of their genes, which might or might not make sense.

How it might? Say, what if the mothers are also twins/half-sisters?

It's not entirely uncommon for half-siblings to look strikingly similar. If Susan's father went for similar phenotypes, this would already reduce possible variation. And if facial structure just happens to be dominated by features due to a handful of linked dominant genes, you have it down to a coin flip.

I mean, think about it this way, have you never seen siblings who look almost identical other than the age difference? But only about half of their genes are the same. The other half is inherited from different grandparents. Yet, often enough, they share the specific genes that happen to play a role in features we used to distinguish people from one another, because there aren't as many of these, and they are frequently linked.

Case in point, if Susan's father is natural blond, and happens to have a thing for natural blonds, then we're basically guaranteed for daughters both being blond. One seemingly random similarity is no longer random.

[Story Monday August 29, 2016]

15 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

But remember that Jerry said that Diane was Susan's long-lost sister. Immortals can lie, but I don't think they lie to themselves very often.

So my current bet is on Edward not being infallible after all, or Edward lying because he believes it's the right thing to do.

Technically, Edward could still be correct and truthful without contradicting Jerry or implying any magical shenanigans going on if Diane is Susan's half-sister. Which is a distinct possibility given what we know about Susan's father, and two persons being born hours apart isn't that crazy of a coincidence.

Occam's Razor points to this explanation, as it is simplest and most mundane. But this is EGS we're talking about.

[Story Monday August 29, 2016]

I choose to remain skeptical. Edward has been shown not to be infallible as far as his information goes. Of course, that would imply Dan very deliberately making a red herring out of a red herring in some sort of red heringception (would that make it an infrared herring?) And it seems unlikely that this would be done without a very significant, yet unrevealed plot reason pertaining to Edward and his knowledge of characters involved. But that still keeps it under the bar I have for skeptical.