I'm not banned yet because the admin's at least a bit sympathetic, but I sure as hell don't think 90% of the group's gonna want to speak to me after this. I told them I'm voting and campaigning for a 3rd party candidate who is anti-Israel and pro-trans and explained that I could not in good conscience vote for Biden after his blatant and willing complicity in genocide. Here are some of the arguments I encountered in response to that:

• "Not voting for Biden makes it easier for Trump to win, and Trump will genocide trans people in addition to Palestinians. Therefore anything you do supports genocide, so you might as well support less genocide."
• "Your trans friends will all know that you're functionally anti-trans." (I'm sure this would be a shock to my trans friends in my org, all of whom have made it clear they will also not vote for Biden)
• "Trump would genocide Palestinians even harder."
• "Biden wants to stop the genocide, but the Republicans won't let him."

Some choice quotes:

Have pride in your self centeredness, I guess.

Choosing someone who you know cannot win, especially as they're not the chosen candidate, is only symbolically different than choosing apathy.

It's just objectively how it works in this system. There is no non vote.

And it is most depressing your friends here at home are not important enough to check one box for.

And this:

[The Palestinian] genocide is going to happen regardless of the two. But the one that's happening here, that one can be stopped. And you refuse to do anything about it because you think you're so much better.

You're right about one thing, though. I do think I'm better than people who give their endorsement to running over Palestinian children with tanks.

And I'm better than people that choose two genocides at once, I guess. If we're ranking each other. I'd laugh if it wasn't stupid.

link

I have a few:

• Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
• Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
• All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
• Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.

At least, that's what I'll do if I don't get bored before it's done (and that's admittedly a big if). Here's an early concept of it - all of the buildings in the residential zone are my designs.

The largest buildings take a lot of effort to make, so I won't do a lot of variations of those. That should work out anyway, since it aligns with the functional commie block aesthetic I'm going for.

Things you can expect a lot of in this city:

• High-density housing
• Mass transit
• Greenspace
• Video arcades
• Public swimming pools

Things you will not find in this city:

• Single occupancy homes
• Lawns
• Bright, gaudy advertisements

In a previous post, I mentioned that my schedule for each temple was as follows:

• 1st month: Plot dungeon map, design and implement dungeon's unique enemy's puzzles, and other mechanics - with placeholder art and sound assets, build and test entire map except for the boss
• 2nd month: Art assets, sounds, and animations for the dungeon.
• 3rd month: Program and gameplay test boss; once satisfied, create art, sound assets, and post-fight dialog for the boss. Give the dungeon to a few close friends for playtesting, then make adjustments based on results.

I started the Unicorn Temple at the beginning of April, and it's now close to the end of May.

• 1st month goal has been met. Dungeon mechanics were fully implemented late in April, giving me a bit of a head start on next month's work. That ended up being a good thing, because...
• 2nd month goal will be met or a few days late. The assets for this dungeon ended up being more elaborate than expected, and I struggled with some of the graphics. Most of the work is done, though, with only some enemy sprites remaining.

Visible in the screenshot are a few different features of this dungeon: certain sections are flooded with both shallow and deep water. Shallow water can be safely walked through, but falling in deep water is functionally the same as falling into a pit. Godot doesn't natively support animated tiles (plus I needed to implement little splashes that happen when you walk through shallow water), so this took extra time to take care of.

Also in the screenshot is one of the three new enemies, thornspitters, whose sprite sheets I have completed. Every couple of seconds, these spherical pods spit thorns in four directions. Some of them, like the ones you see here, are placed such that they're impossible to kill.

The streams, the wheel with a handle, and the little caves are part of a water routing puzzle that will form the centerpiece of this dungeon. This puzzle encompasses many rooms, and solving it is required to collect the Master Key that opens access to the Unicorn's room.

I'm currently working on a sprite sheet for another enemy, the Foxfolk. These magical menaces constantly teleport to your position and emit bursts of magical fire, forcing you to stay on the move. Here is one of the completed sprites:

I'm picturing a game where you take the role of an arcology planner and are given a certain number of ingame years to prove the viability of the concept as fully as possible. Game takes place on an isometric grid, where you build your arcology out of predefined modules such as living quarters, industries, power plants, greenhouses, etc. You have to manage things like the flow of resources between districts, transit, waste management. You can connect your arcology to the wider world to do things like import resources and export waste, and you will need to do so especially in the early game, but you also gain a growing ability to handle these things within your arcology as you expand its capabilities. Maybe also have the player have to deal with structural soundness and making sure the arcology doesn't collapse. Scoring would probably be based on population, land footprint (smaller is better), and self-sufficiency.

Hmm. Maybe after Guardian Cry.

Someone on this site recently linked the blog http://www.indi.ca. It's good, for the most part. It's anti-imperialist, pro-communist, pro-China, all that good stuff. It offers, among many other things, solid materialist analysis of things like why Ukraine has been losing and why a model depending on infinite economic growth is inherently unsustainable.

Which is why it came as a surprise and disappointment to me when the guy responsible used anticapitalism to push theocracy. The fact that he otherwise has good takes is the only reason this piece stood out enough to me to critique. I'm going to break this down.

Long ago—in the 'Enlightenment' they stole from the Lord Buddha—Europeans killed their Lord and called it a brave new day. They've been proselytizing this path ever since, calling it secularism. Instead of an invisible man they now believe in an invisible hand, with economists as its priests and scientists as its miracle workers. And this great golden god called 'the economy' really did work miracles. People got used to growth every year, something which used to be an anomaly. The first shall be first and the last shall be last, but don't worry, it'll trickle down eventually. When things got bad, as they do cyclically, the economists just sacrificed some children and poor people and it all got growing again.

In truth, all they really value is money. Principal is the only principle, profit is the only prophet, usury is the only use. The astonishing belief that there was a man in the sky was replaced with ‘the [even more] astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds,’ as John Maynard Keynes said. A fairly full description of capitalism from one its architects. The 'invisible hand' was a throwaway metaphor from Adam Smith that somehow became a state religion, like basing your civilization on a random joke you heard at a party. This obviously hasn't worked out in the end (awfully hot, isn't it?). Westerners thought they were following science but, more accurately, they were following Satan.

The very first thing the author does is present a false dichotomy between religion and capitalism - the possibility that a person can be both religious and capitalist (see American evangelicals) or neither (see any socialist country with a policy of state atheism) is simply not entertained.

Am I calling for a caliphate, or the return of God kings? I'm not against it.

Here we go. The bait-and-switch. Up until now, the article has been making entirely reasonable critiques of capitalism, but now it pivots to using those critiques to push social conservatism (a common fascist tactic).

There are so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to begin. The most obvious answer is to point out that theocracy has never stopped environmental destruction or colonial exploitation, and in fact, the two are often bedfellows. Franco's Spain was hardly known for its environmental protections. Saudi Arabia is under religious authority, and it's the largest oil exporter in the world while at the same time committing genocide in Yemen. Bolsonaro, a Christian fascist, gleefully bulldozed huge portions of the Amazon while driving out and murdering the indigenous population. The most rabid pro-Israel, pro-capitalist, anti-environment people in America are die-hard evangelical Christians, and Israel itself is a religious state. By contrast, communism - a movement the author repeatedly supports elsewhere - has a long and consistent history of anticlerical views and policies. Cuba has never colonized anyone and is the most sustainable country in the world.

Religion is just a way of perceiving higher things. Why shouldn't it have a place in governing?

The author is straight, male, and a member of the majority religion in his country (Buddhist in Sri Lanka), which may be why this poses a legitimate question for him. It's very easy to answer "why shouldn't it" if you're trans woman in the US, a gay man in Iran (or the US), a woman in Saudi Arabia (or the US), or a Muslim in India (or the US). He does not consider these people even for a second - or if he does, he considers them an acceptable sacrifice. Given that he has already written about his own country's religious authorities persecuting minorities, I lean toward the latter. "I'm okay with you and your friends being murdered by theocratic fascists to save the world" would be ghoulish even if it would actually work. As it is, it's just grossly indifferent to human life.

It all started when western philosophy severed the religious part of their brain (the practicing, not the preaching) and ran headlong across the continents, killing, colonizing, and enslaving and calling it ‘enlightenment’. This was supposed to be replaced with a secular, scientific morality, but we the colonized have never seen any evidence of this.

This is, of course, a completely ahistorical and absurd view of colonialism. The old-time European colonizers loved their Christianity. Residential schools, missionaries, and forced conversions were all part and parcel of the colonial playbook. Churches backed colonialism under the guise of saving souls, and the enterprise was carried out by kings and queens who justified their rule with divine right.

The author has spoken positively of Christianity elsewhere in his blog, so I'm sure he would say that all of these examples weren't "real Christianity" - an argument that rings as hollow as when capitalists say that monopolies and colonialism "aren't real capitalism." We must judge a system by its results when put into practice.

Pictured: a 179 cycle solution for the Small Excavator

An engineering game, as I'd define it, is a game where a primary gameplay element is designing machines for some purpose, weighing conflicting needs such as cost, versatility, and performance. I've only played a handful of these games, and I really wish I could find more. Here are some of the ones I've enjoyed:

Kerbal Space Program: I'd call this a definitive example of an engineering game, and one I have hundreds of hours in. I absolutely love designing rockets, figuring out what I'll need for each mission, experimenting with different staging mechanisms to maximize fuel efficiency, pushing my available tools to the absolute limit to land on far-off celestial bodies, etc.

Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game: Yes, I know, fuck cars, but I'm having fun with this one. There are a lot of different niches you can cater to, and I enjoy specializing in affordable, reliable, fuel-efficient sedans and compact cars against the trend of turning everything into a gas-guzzling behemoth.

Master of Orion: Yes, a DOS game from 1994, and primarily a 4x, but its ship designer has some of the best balance between simplicity and depth I've ever seen. Ships have a limited hull capacity, but no fixed number of weapon hardpoints, and they can only fit a handful of special modules, but there are dozens to choose from, with widely varying capabilities. The number of actual choices to make is small, but they involve balancing so many things - durability, damage reduction, damage output, armor penetration, weapon range, maneuverability - and the turn-based combat gives enough control to let you really appreciate the impact your designs have.

Avorion: A space flight sim with highly customizable ships built out of blocks, with fine-grained control over things like engine power, maneuver thrusters, and armor thickness, and cargo bay sizes. I wanted to like this one, but it's way too grindy for me (building up your reputation with factions takes forever, and they won't let you buy better ship equipment until you do).

Robocraft: A game where you design a robot and then pit it against other players' creations in online team battles. My best creations were a spider bot that could scuttle up and over hills and ambush enemies with a massive plasma burst, and an air defense bot with bigass twin AAGs and a shitload of top armor. I had a lot of fun with this one back in the day, but nowadays it's so deserted that most of the players are bots.

Pictured is the Gryphon boss battle. She is fast and aggressive, and victory requires the player to dodge her rapid-fire dives and charges while exploiting split-second openings to hit her. Upon being defeated and purged of her corruption, she bestows the protagonist with the ability to do a diving stab, allowing him to cross large gaps and hit enemies with a powerful sword strike.

Next up is the Unicorn Temple, which I actually started late in March - I'm running a bit ahead of schedule. Goal is to release by the end of 2025, and so far, that's looking likely. Development roadmap is as follows:

• 2023: Engine, UI, Phoenix Temple, Demo (completed)
• 2024 Jan-Mar: Gryphon Temple (completed)
• 2024 Apr-Jun: Unicorn Temple (in progress)
• 2024 Jul-Sep: Minotaur Temple
• 2024 Oct-Dec: Final Dungeon
• 2025: Overworld, intro and ending cinematics, polish, closed beta

Development process for each individual dungeon generally goes like so (with the exception of the Phoenix Temple, since I built many parts of it concurrently with the engine):

• 1st month: Plot dungeon map, design and implement dungeon's unique enemy's puzzles, and other mechanics with placeholder art and sound assets, build and test entire map except for the boss (on track to finish this by the end of April for the Unicorn Temple)
• 2nd month: Art assets, sounds, and animations for the dungeon.
• 3rd month: Program and gameplay test boss; once satisfied, create art, sound assets, and post-fight dialog for the boss. Give the dungeon to a few close friends for playtesting, then make adjustments based on results.