Student of Trinity

Dantius knows nos.

Let's turn on an option to hide tiny little subversive messages in the serifs of all our characters.

Rum comes in puncheons. That was a good branding measure, right there.

Hey, now. Be nice to the guy. Three months is long enough for renewbification to set in. Remember when you were a newb, and had no idea what this place was all about? Well, then. Dantius, welcome to the boards. You probably want to know which Spiderweb game is the best. You should start a topic here about that. Or in any forum at all, really. Everyone will be friendly and offer helpful advice. One particular piece of friendly advice, though — and here, I have to say, I am speaking in my role as a Global Moderator of these forums: we are a bit fussy here about spelling and grammar. So don't split any semicolons, or we'll ban you, and your little dog, too. Have a nice day.

Right. That saved my G4 singleton servile once against the Titan. He had finally slain the beast, but he had only a sliver of health left, and he was still facing a couple of fully healthy rotdhizons or something, with only a couple of nearly-dead charmed kyshakks on his side. They would kill him just by exploding. With just a few AP left, too hopped up on combat adrenaline to move from the spot, he suddenly notices a really cool pillar machine thing half across the big room. Before he knows it, he has raced half way over there to give it a look. Serviles are total geeks that way, I guess. So the rots eat the kyshakks, nothing else attacks my isolated servile, and he boots it all the way to the zone edge with his next 18 AP.

Hey, it's a good point, Sylae. Why did you folks think it was a good idea to put the badness in, again? You should just take that out, and put goodness in, instead. I keep threatening to stand a big jar of green liquid in our kitchen, with an elegantly handwritten label on it, saying, "Bad". Obviously something must make some food taste bad. Some recipes must call for it.

The Athame is perfect. Smite ... I dunno. The hammer head is a bit small, to my taste.

It's not exactly 1 AP per action. It's that you're allowed to go below 0 AP with your last action in the round. Even without really flagrant engine abuse, some of the old tactics were a bit too good. In any zone with a lot of corners, with a bit of extra AP you could shoot, then run back around a corner, and by the time your enemy got line of sight on you, it had too few AP to attack. You could repeat this round after round, and take down unlimited numbers of dangerous ranged enemies. As Dikiyoba says, it was fun the first time, but after that, it just made the game seem silly. The big thing was just stopping you from moving after attacking. The other things were mainly to compensate you for that, or so I figured. That's why I think that the change may well have been aimed at nerfing that particular trick. But I think that Jeff found he also liked the change in general. It helped to make melee a lot less stupid. I like to think that I was at least the straw that broke the camel's back, by explaining that corner trick to Jeff while beta-testing G4. It was just after that that he made the big change. But probably a lot of other people had been pointing out the abuses for quite some time.

For over 17,000 like-clicks the prizes had better be fabulous indeed.

McLuhan! thou should'st be living at this hour. There are cool games and hot games, I guess. I guess they can both work. But maybe lukewarm games are a bad idea.

Specific heat is the rate at which temperature changes with heat input, but its implications for bizarre thermodynamics come about as follows. When you allow negative specific heat, you have to give up the familiar relationship between temperature and being hot or cold. A body with negative specific heat has higher temperature when it has less heat in it, and vice versa. So a hotter body (with negative specific heat) actually has lower temperature than a cooler body (meaning a body that contains less heat). The usual meaning of temperature is flipped around. Temperature still has a meaning in thermodynamics, though, of being the inverse of the rate of change of entropy with heat input. Entropy always increases when heat flows from higher temperature bodies to lower temperature bodies, by definition. What negative specific heat then means is that, if two identical bodies with negative specific heat are put in contact, heat will spontaneously flow from the one that has less heat (so higher temperature) to the one that already has more heat (so lower temperature). Kind of like exploitative capitalism, where the rich get richer by taking from the poor. That's how stars form: heat spontaneously concentrates into protostars, the way money spontaneously concentrates in capitalist economies, because as soon as somebody gets a little bit richer than their neighbors, they tend to keep on getting richer by even more. So much for thermodynamics, which is a high-level theory that doesn't say what specific heat anything has — you have to work that out from lower level theories, or else just measure it. The lower level theories get explicit about exactly what forces are acting, and so on. So for star formation, that brings in gravity. It also brings in gas dynamics, which normally means statistical mechanics, because bazillions of particles bouncing around in a gas don't get any easier to analyze exactly just because the whole thing is taking place across light years in outer space. But the statistical mechanics of negative specific heat is a bit of a can of worms. Statistical mechanics is an axiomatic theory, and its axioms are in principle falsifiable. They are statements about how bazillions of particles should behave, but the particles ultimately answer to Isaac Newton (or Erwin Schrödinger), not to statistical mechanics. The statistical mechanical axioms might just be wrong. And in fact there are several alternative sets of statistical mechanical axioms, which normally all lead to the same predictions, but not always. Negative specific heat is one case where the rival axioms do disagree. The most popular axiom set never permits this, but a close contender in popularity does permit it sometimes. So one way to explain what my student and I have just done is to say that we've found a system that we can solve at the Schrödinger level, and for which the contender axiom set indeed yields negative specific heat. We then verify that the Schrödinger-level analysis supports the spontaneous hotspot behavior predicted by the negative specific heat claim, as in star formation, rather than the usual behavior in which hotspots always smooth out.

A friend of mine used to have an e-mail sig line that read, "Hydrogen is a clear, colorless gas which, given long enough, turns into people." I think he might have meant that as a kind of creationist argument, though I'm not sure, but I'm happy to consider it as a fact. Cool. Recently I've been working on an important step in that hydrogen-to-people process, namely star formation. Huge, cold clouds of gas in space spontaneously develop hot spots, and the hot spots steadily intensify, until you get a ball of gas, held together by its own gravity, that is hot enough for nuclear fusion in the middle. The thing is that normally heat doesn't spontaneously concentrate like that. Normally hotspots don't just appear in cold objects, and any concentrations of heat that do exist normally tend to disperse and cool down, rather than heating up further. Normally, in fact, this is exactly what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is all about. Some textbooks even state the Law just that way, saying that heat must always flow from hotter to colder bodies, never the other way around. But there's a loophole, involving a curious wrinkle in thermodynamics: the possibility that a quantity called the 'specific heat' can be negative. Normally it's positive, and some books even say it always has to be, but in fact it can be negative for cold clouds of gas in space. When it is negative, thermodynamics turns upside down, and heat flows from colder to hotter. So any little infinitesimal hotspot will tend to amplify, until eventually a star is born. Lately one of my students and I have discovered that we can also make laboratory systems with robustly negative specific heat, in a very controlled way. So we (that is, not we, but groups that actually have labs) may soon be able to investigate this bizarre backwards corner of thermodynamics in the laboratory. Heretofore it has pretty much been pure theory, to explain star formation.

I have almost finished teaching Quantum Mechanics 1. Next semester I get to do QM 2. It should be fun, because I'll get to put all my own favorite stuff in it, but won't be obliged to cover anything really horribly hard. I'm also going to help do our seminar on scientific writing. I started that seminar, and it's always fun. Preparing the QM1 lectures has been taking me about 3 hours preparation per hour of lecture, maybe 3-1/2. So around ten hours per week. That's about as good as it gets, because I know this stuff all cold. QM2 will probably push that up quite a bit, but on the other hand I'll be able to re-use some old notes from a few years ago. QM2 is a good hunting ground for future grad students, too. I can slip in a few plugs for my own research, and also get to see which of our undergrads are really sharp. Undergrad teaching takes up a relatively small fraction of my time. It's not actually the main part of my job at all — it's not even supposed to be. I'm mostly supposed to do research and train grad students. That's the German concept of professors. Students are mainly responsible for teaching themselves. The university is the well of knowledge, but they have to hoist the bucket. They don't pay tuition, after all. If you're a student then depending on where you're going to school, your professors too may be spending quite a few hours preparing their classes, yet having their performance judged mainly on entirely different things. It's not always smart to leave your education entirely up to them, trusting them to give you all you need. You should ask them all the questions you can think of, when you have the chance in class, and then get some second opinions from other sources. (Don't read the above if you are only going to school for the sake of pure knowledge.)

The First Law of Thermodynamics is the statement that this is indeed a fantasy. You're imagining a perpetual motion machine that just happens to involve a bit of chemistry. People have been working on this kind of thing for centuries. Thermodynamics is the hard-won result. It's an empirical fact that there is no free lunch. The precise way that it fails to work in this case is this. It costs exactly as much energy to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen as you get by burning hydrogen. The fact that the burning makes a nice explosion while electrolysis is a gentle bubbling just says how fast the two reactions are happening. Electrolysis is a lot slower, but the total energy budget is exactly the same for both. And in fact it's going to be impossible to recover all the energy from burning into any useful form, so the machine won't even break even. Thermodynamics says that it's always going to be something like that. It always is.

If you say that it's wrong for lots of animals to die just so that humans can have cheaper electricity to play video games with, then to me that has a ring of truth. Slaughtering animals for trivial purposes is just wrong. They have some kind of right to survive, too. There is also something to the idea that lack of respect for animal life is somehow inhuman. The way I'd put it is that treating animals callously is a training in cruelty that too easily spills over into human relations. Respect for animal life is a sort of imperative of skill. It develops the moral skill of respect for others in general. I believe this is an old rabbinical interpretation of the famous Jewish taboo against mixing meat and milk, which is simply a way of ensuring that one could not possibly violate the literal Biblical commandment not to boil a goat in its mother's milk. But I would happily make an entire animal species go extinct if it would somehow save the life of a single human being. All the seagulls in the world are not worth one human infant. Inside that infant is a whole subjective universe. Inside the seagulls, no-one is home. To sacrifice the life of another human to save some animals would be murder. So somewhere in between there is a balance. I think we could pave most of the sahara with solar panels, and keep a few thousand square miles of it as a wildlife preserve. All life may be sacred in some sense, but there are also limits to this principle. Extinction is also part of nature. The idea that every genome is sacred is a human conceit, not respected at all by the genomes themselves. Animal species have driven each other to extinction countless times in the history of the planet. The earth itself will not last forever. Eventually the whole planet will probably be consumed by the sun when it goes red giant. Write the planet's obituary; carve its epitaph. What grounds will there be for anything out there to care about what happened on this old wet rock before it burned? Human culture, or nothing. Billions of years of seagull screeching won't be worth anyone's notice. If we have to, we can dam some rivers. We should not dam more than we have to. The main reason for refraining from that may be what it does to us, rather than what it does to fish. In this sense, I think I might reach all the same practical conclusions as Goldenking, but I would not apologize for anthropocentrism.

Recently read The Siren Depths by Martha Wells. Third in a series that now looks to be stretching indefinitely. Nice in some ways, if you've gotten interested in the characters, but the main plot turns out to be largely arbitrary. Stuff happens just because the author says it happens. That's always true, of course, but I find I prefer it when it somehow doesn't seem that way as you're reading. I like the illusion of causality. When too many important things are just invented out of nowhere, without any sense that they follow logically from some fundamental facts, then it starts to seem that anything can happen, at any time, and so nothing that happens really means anything. I start to feel that I might as well just flip to the end and check the final status of the major characters, because how they got that way will not have mattered at all. This is an interesting issue, now that I think about it. My own effort at writing a novel is turning out to be largely about this. I'm trying to make everything happen for a reason. Not necessarily a profound reason, but not just because I say so. In my case it's a big constraint that there is no actual magic and only a little bit of quasi-magical technology. I'm also trying to make all the important characters intelligent and responsible adults for whom irrational tantrums are not an excuse for doing dumb things. This is landing me practically in hoodunnit territory, as far as the effort to rationalize everything is concerned. Even if everybody's smart and there is no magic, I think you can still wind up with an arbitrary plot that doesn't really grip, if you just fail to give enough detail about critical things. There's a gunfight, the bad guys miss, the good guys don't. Well, okay; but why? If it's just because you write that that's the way it happened, it all kind of falls apart, at least for me. If you want to keep my interest, I have to see that the bad guys were drunk, or their sights were off, or the good guys used a smokescreen, or something. The thing I appreciated most about The Lies of Locke Lamora was how consistently that story did that kind of thing. Almost nothing important was just stated to have happened. Almost everything that happened had a little story in its own right, showing how it happened. I'm not just asking for more descriptive detail about events. I want logical connection in the details, showing how one detail leads to another. Lavish detail isn't enough, if every detail is arbitrary. I'm also not asking that everything that happens be rigidly attached to some grand design. I've quite enjoyed stories by Lawrence Watt-Evans in which important consequences sometimes follow from sheer accident, like a character dropping an important item at an inopportune time. That's the kind of detail I appreciate: the character climbs a tree in a hurry to escape some predator, and in the effort to do this, his gun falls out of his pocket. The guy isn't implausibly clumsy. He just fails to be preternaturally deft. I can see how it happens, I can believe that it happens, and when I know that things like this can and do happen in the author's story, I start to care a little more about everything that happens. I'm more impressed when the character pulls off some feat, for knowing that he did it even with accidental dropping turned on. In a way that's silly, of course. The author just decided that the character would drop something at one point, and figure out how to cope with that, and then not drop anything later, when it really counted. But nonetheless it works. I feel as though dropping items was turned on throughout the book, because it happened plausibly once. Maybe all I'm saying is that "Show, don't tell" applies to plot as well as character. Don't just tell me how it turns out. Show me how it happens. The Siren Depths seemed to me to fail to do that enough. I kind of blew through it without being all that invested in the events, even though I cared about the characters.

Those are great. The alien blade is really alien-looking, but not to the point that it fails to look like a usable blade. The jade halberd is also really good, to me. Somehow the shape of the axehead looks as though it makes sense for a magic weapon made out of jade. The haft makes sense, too. Rather formal, like a staff of office.

The overall style looks great, but the way that the bow itself bends — those joints look too weak. It's hard to see the spine of the bow, so the bow looks as though it's just made of fragile-looking feathery things, lightly taped together. It makes the whole weapon look flimsy, I'm afraid. Can't you do something to beef up the look of that join, somehow, so that the thing looks strong and deadly instead of fragile? It might even be enough just to make several layers of the wing-like units. That would make the bow look a lot stronger. Or perhaps just to put the wing-things underneath the spine of the bow, which is hard to see right now.

Heh. "I am become Jeff."

Zzzzzz. Whuh? Oh. Mngghhh. Zzzzzzzzzz,

Wow. It's a hard choice, but I think I find Demonslayer more impressive. The level of detail in the hilt is so high, without being silly, that it really looks like a magic greatsword, not just a fancy one. Like a complex machine. When you get finished with Avernum, actually, maybe you should turn to steampunk.

If there isn't interest here in single-session AIMHack campaigns, there should be. It's a lot easier to get people together once. And the constraint of having everything wrap up in one session is a fun one, actually. I did this over Christmas with a mixed group of nieces and nephews plus my older daughter, 8 kids from ages 5 to 13. The five-year-old didn't actually participate much, but he technically made the final winning move. When he suddenly wanted to join in, right at the end, he was given control of his sister's character's pet snake. His winning move was a successful roll to regurgitate. So already you know it was totally awesome, but let me explain more. This was a short family ski getaway, in a remote little cottage in the deep Quebec snow. Everyone wanted to roll up characters, and then draw their characters, but the only dice we had were a copy of the Steve Jackson game Zombie Dice. So, fine, I improvised an entire new set of rules that used only dice that showed Brain, Footsteps, or Shotgun Blast — in varying proportions out of 6, depending on the die's color. If somebody rolled a Brain, that was good. If they rolled Blast, that was bad. If the task seemed easy, the player got to use a green die, with 3 Brains and only one Blast. If the task seemed hard, they had to use a red die, with the opposite proportions. In between got the yellow die, with two faces for each shape. Those were the rules, in their entirety, and they were enough. I let the kids choose their characters pretty freely. I let them each have one special power. One ended up being an intelligent monkey noble, with the power to summon a monkey army once in the game, but only if there were monkeys around. One started out being a fallen guardian angel, able to fly, but only to rescue someone other than herself; but then she changed at the last minute into something more mundane, mainly because of general dissatisfaction with the way the wings on her character sketch were turning out. One was going to take a submachine gun, but when I insisted that she could not have more than thirty bullets, she opted for the pet snake instead. Another was a werewolf, but unfortunately we sort of forgot about this in the course of the game. That particular player made some valuable contributions with her crossbow, but when she didn't know what else to do, she opted for literally 'doing the hokey-pokey' in the dungeon. Apparently, for her, that was what it was all about. Another was 'a crab-man'. We never really pinned down what that meant, because doing so seemed like kind of a can of worms as far as I was concerned, but the player really enjoyed making claw gestures whenever he attacked something. The oldest nephew wanted two daggers that were permanently on fire. They ended up serving as the party's only light sources throughout the game, and it was a darned good thing that he had two. One niece was half-vampire, and could turn into a bat at will. Arguments about just how much weight a bat could lift became a sort of leitmotif. By the end we had the physiology of this particular bat pinned down very precisely indeed. Gamemastering with this kind of player group is not for the doctrinaire rulebooknik. In fact I really recommend a strong beer accompaniment. Then it goes well. The premise was: the peaceful jungle kingdom is being overrun by horrible pygmy cannibals from another dimension. Your chief witchdoctor has determined that the only hope is to retrieve the Emerald Skull from its lost ruined temple. Go! There was a simple puzzle to get into the lost ruined temple, a pit trap, a snakepit, a maze full of face-eating spiders, a chasm spanned by a tiny rope bridge with a giant spider lurking above, an army of skeletons, and an unbeatably enormous serpent guarding the Emerald Skull. Yada yada yada, they did a decent job of getting through all that, including successfully blinding all of the giant spider's eight eyes. They got the Emerald Skull, and dumped the skeleton army into the chasm by cutting the rope bridge behind them. Everybody survives, but the boldest and bravest of the cousins is satisfyingly down to one health point, and every escape has been narrow. Everyone agrees that they have really had it with these doggone snakes in this doggone pit. Finally they make it out. Only to be met by the chief witch doctor, frantically shouting across the waterfall that they have to put the skull back, because the only way to banish the pygmy cannibals is to leave the skull on its sacred pillar, but turned to face the opposite way. Chief witch doctor then falls with a pygmy spear in his back. Much consternation. General satisfaction with the fate of the witch doctor. They end up climbing onto the back of the blind giant spider, after it tries to eat them again, and steering it by lowering food in front of its face. They successfully ride it back to the pillar cavern, and manage to feed it to the giant serpent, jumping off just in time, so that the serpent goes into a digestive torpor and leaves them in peace. At an early stage they had argued and pleaded and made a lucky roll, to get the pet snake to swallow the Emerald Skull, because that seemed like a good idea at the time. At the end they had to get the pet snake to disgorge the Emerald Skull in order to save the world. If you think it was an obvious alternative to just kill the pet snake and dig the Skull out, you have not grokked the ethos of this particular gaming community. The world can burn a thousand times before Snakey loses a scale. But little brother came through, and it was a wrap. The campaign constraints that it all finish up in one session, and use only Zombie Dice, turned out to be liberating and fun. It might be worth trying to do something similar with AIMHack.

My story is roaring along. Somewhere around 40,000 words so far, I think. I'm working on chapter 10, now, and I have already done several pages of what is supposed to be the next section of the book. After Chapter 12 there'll be a different narrator, for what is supposed to be about a third of the book, before coming back to Anastasia in the end. The middle chunk is the diary of this native princeling, Thomas MacLayne, which Anastasia acquires and pastes into her memoir. A lot of it is about her, but from a different perspective. I like how it's working out so far. The second narrator is another interesting character, at least to me. In part, he's a foil to her. He is suave and charismatic, an actor and a gifted emotional manipulator, where she barely knows what emotions are. My plan for writing him is to spend as long as it takes to come up with the perfect things for him to say in each situation, and then have him say them off the top of his head. He's actually not supposed to be a jerk at all, though. Where Anastasia is the fantasy about the sane and decent person having superior firepower, and never being fazed by anything, Thomas is the fantasy about the sane and decent person having guile and charm. Plus another bizarre superpower of his own. And yeah, he's a love interest, though it's an extremely problematic match from both sides, and the story as a whole is by no means mainly a love story. None of the major plot twists have yet appeared, but I have them planned out. The whole thing may run to around 150,000 words if the later parts of my plot skeleton expand in the same ratio that the first parts have. It's still a lot of fun to write. But: I'm starting to worry about the potential legal implications of posting it all here. Someday this thing may be publishable. I'm not planning to give up my day job in any case, and if it turns out that nobody but me really likes the story, Ehh, oh well. It will have been a hoot to do, just for myself. But why close any doors when I don't have to, you know? I don't seem to be needing the rhythm of posting chapters here to keep me writing. I may post more chapters if I get around to finding out what the commercial consequences of posting them are, and discover that they are unimportant. Otherwise, y'all may have to wait for a while to find out what happens. Thanks for reading.

This is a decent enough argument you're having, but I think it's futile, because there are too many large unknowns. Mars has a gravity well; that's bad. But Mars is also a planet, with a thin atmosphere and unknown subsurface resources. Being able to use those things might more than make up for the gravity well. Or not. I don't think we can say at this point. It might be worth visiting an asteroid soon just to compare the project with the moon landings.

"Damascus steel" seems like a strange description for a world in which there is no city of Damascus. Though it's an interesting question. As well as lacking Damascus, it seems unlikely that the Empire speaks English. So presumably everything we read about Exile/Avernum is translated, anyway. Some technique like the Damascus steel-making process could well exist in Avernum. So how should it be named? Is calling it 'Damascus steel' just the same kind of translation as using the English word 'sword' for Demonslayer? The right answer is clearly not to think about all this so much. But somehow referring to a real-world city by name seems out of place in a fantasy world.