keira

my bad, blades.calref.net stopped being a thing a few months ago for Reasons. i've attached all the files that were uploaded there tho, for posterity.

apologies for breaking all these links 😔

alint-0.9.1_sytest1-win32.zip

BoE Scenario Editor PWF.exe

BoE-1.2.0a-win32.exe

BoE-Carbon-latest.zip

CBoE-x86_64.zip

yo what it is DJ keira in the house to hijack this topic and say hi, wow i haven't been here in awhile what's this about a new game and stuff

how has everyone been it's 7:14 am and i'm sleppy af.

regards,

the keira formerly known as sylae

yo bees ❤️

real talk tho an alarming amount of our foods depend on pollination to, uh, work, and there's not a whole lot of "breeds" of bees going around much anymore? i believe it's the same problem as crop monocultures wherein, if we get some sort of hella scary varroa mite that's resistant to current treatments, or whatever sort of hellish bee disease, that's going to be a Big Problem.

like it's been awhile but iirc there's only like three or four "breeds" of honeybee (italian, caucasian, russian, african?), so if one or two of those get wiped out, a huge segment of our food supply is Boned. there's a reason diversity exists, and we've been systematically destroying it all across the bits of the biosphere we like to eat.

I have an unreleased scenario in which one town is a giant underground Venice-style boat place spanning multiple "towns" with nodes at the edges to get to other places. And that was like Many years ago, so it's been a thing at least as far back as cboe.

here's this years

dunno where my old stuff went

bleh

what slarty said, this site has always been hella clunky. how hard is it to use <label> tags on ur labels.

6 hours ago, msazad said:

FWIW, most people aren't assigned a gender at birth. They're identified as male or female (which is different from gender) based on traits which are in most cases not ambiguous.

I'm all for kids not being assigned gender at birth, but that is definitely a thing that happens. You can talk about oh but the box on the birth certificate says "sex" not "gender" but for the vast majority of the population those two match up.

And you know what? That's fine. For almost all people the system works out fine. Maybe I'm a bad trans for saying this, but I am fine with a system that has "assigned at birth" as a thing. (what it does need, however, is an easy way to say "oh wait we made a mistake that's not accurate" and a culture that is ok with making said mistake (and not making such a fuss about not conforming to gender norms and all that (admittedly these are big steps from where humanity is now))).

(aside: Of course, I'm also the kind of trans who doesn't understand why getting that marker amended on a birth certificate is a big deal. Like, I'm fine with getting it changed, but I don't see the need. Like, that was what they thought when I popped out, so they gave me an M and a deadname. Oops.)

2 hours ago, Sudanna said:

This is only occasionally what transgender means in theory, and never all that it means in practice. Regardless: I and at least several other respondents are neither(not just "yeah i'm cis but eh") and I at least resent attempts at annexation.

Fair point, but do you have a better way to phrase the question that

1. is accessible for people whose primary language isn't english? (the cis/trans definitions I used are, while not 100% accurate, basically what pops up if one were to google those terms).
2. provides a useful set of data that can be worked with? (the primary purpose of a survey, which has been mentioned millions of times.

I mean, there could be an option for every gender identity under the sun. It would have a billionty options and probably an Other box for the ones that got missed. Would it be super duper accurate? yes. Would it be in any way at all usable? not at all.

So the goal is to find a compromise between the unusability of:

• Dropdown with 8,000 options

and the crassness of:

• Normal
• Not normal

(or, arguably)

• what I was assigned at birth
• Not what I was assigned at birth

Because really, the second is what this comes down to. Like, if this was a survey with 1,000 responses, I'm sure the first option would be feasible. But the whole point of this is looking at the population you have, and for a place like SW, I don't think there's enough people to get beyond the second and still have the question be any good.

1 hour ago, Soul of Wit said:

I just don't identify as cis or trans, thus neither. I accurately answered as to how I self-identify.

boy i really wish i identified as a cis woman, because being a trans one is a huge pain.

cisgender and transgender have a clean mapping to two different definitions:

• cisgender: a person who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (ie a man that is AMAB).
• transgender: a person who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth (ie a man that is AFAB, or a nonbinary person, or a genderfluid person).

Now unless I'm missing something, mathematically that covers 100% of the population. I guess you could make an argument for questioning/not sure people, but I strongly doubt that is the case here given the numbers seen in the survey results (if it is, hey, that seems like a great thing to put in the comments field of the survey, to explain!).

I don't like the term trans. I don't. Maybe that makes me an awful person, but I hate that I have to live the rest of my life feeling like I'm a woman* instead of a woman. However, that is what I am. I am a trans woman. Yeah you bet I'm salty over that.

As much as I dislike using that label, for the purposes of accurate demographic information yeah I'm going to fill out the survey in the fashion that most accurately describes myself. Anything else is providing inaccurate info and bringing into question the validity of the survey results. Bad data is worse than no data.

15 minutes ago, Arachne-Mole said:

LGBT, Calref: current wealth 2.0 (Working Class), family wealth 2.4 (Working Class), education 0.8

so what you are saying is all i need to do is become cis and then i'll be able to afford to transition

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

Calref, OTOH, is distinct from the general survey-taking population and FULL of correlations.  Members are on average younger (by 9 years), poorer and less connected to family (each by half a step), and more likely to be LGBT (59% vs 19%).  Predictably, they are more likely to socialize with friends in this community (82% vs 25%) and enjoy silly memes (71% vs 23%), but are less likely to analyze game mechanics (29% vs 58%).  They are less often drivers (35% vs 55%).

give me your tired, your poor, your huddled gays yearning to [redacted].

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

Contrastingly, though, they also spend fewer hours per week gaming on average.

I wonder what this compares to from five years ago. Between then in now a lot of people on CalRef got, like, jobs, and other lame adult stuff.

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

higher than average fans of just one video game listed, Minecraft (71% vs 19%).

As far as I'm aware, we're the only part of the SW community that's hosted a minecraft server (not anymore sadly, but Actaeon has a neat vanilla server I'd be on if I had more time for games).

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

People who chose trans are on average younger (24) and significantly less close to their family of origin (by just over one step).  They are much more likely to participate in AimHack (43% vs 8%), text-based RPs (57% vs 8%), and silly memes (71% vs 33%).

Escapism? Hell, I was making girl RPG characters back when I was an egg, even.

as far as silly memes are concerned, my life got a lot easier when I discovered I could convey my feelings via image macros of Our Lord And Saviour Felix

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

Extraverts are more likely to express interest in almost everything, naming themselves a fan, on average, of 2 more music genres, 1 more game, and half a TV show.

I might have missed this, but is there a relation between intra/extraversion and economic class?

6 hours ago, Arachne-Mole said:

CCG players are on average ... nearly a full step poorer.

4 hours ago, Dikiyoba said:

Chessrook: Crotch Door

oh good i'm not the only ten year old

6 hours ago, Randomizer said:

A car made a right turn over a sidewalk and ten feet of gravel into a sound barrier wall. Another car was struck, knocked over a sidewalk, a ten foot drainage ditch, and then into a sound barrier wall.

did anyone break the sound barrier

boy i really suck at english but i've PMed my attempt.

5 hours ago, Triumph said:

So, umm, general question for the audience: is "Io" ever used to mean anything in English besides one of the moons of Jupiter? I'm not sure how the proper name of a moon (or mythological figure, I guess) could have synonyms, but I'm also stumped as to what other possible meaning the word could have.

the dota-playing Past Sylae got stuck thinking that Io == Wisp, but i couldn't come up with anything. Probably not a good clue though

wouldn't that be as easy as (roughly) time_of_day = get_current_tick() % 5000 ?

i'd imagine, if you need get_current_tick() for ticks beyond 30k, you could probably just have a script run periodically to check if the tick count is less than it was last time you checked (ie it overflowed?) and increment a global or SDF or whatever.

then you can basically just do (times overflowed*30000)+get_current_tick() to get a better tick value as well, i suppose?

16 minutes ago, Edgwyn said:

Sylae, marriage for any two people who are 18 or over would qualify in my mind as an expansion of rights that many conservatives did not support without justification.  I suspect that a number (though probably not a majority) of the people who did not support it were concerned about it trampling on their right to freely exercise their religion (Church X does not recognize marriages which is recognized by the US government and so refuses to host certain marriage ceremonies in their facility, so Church X should lose its tax exempt status and be sued out of existence).  While many of us hope that a Church would be seen as different under the law than a commercial enterprise (baker, restaurant, etc), the dividing line between church as religious institution and church as commercial enterprise is gray and wavy making it not unreasonable for some people to be concerned that the government would attempt to dictate policies inside of the church.

why should we treat religious institutions any separately from their secular counterparts (non-profit org or business, depending on the church, i guess) in a secular government.

also, saying "we should be allowed to be bigoted because we're religious" is silly. why does your religion get to impact someone else.

because of tax exemptions for religious institutions, my tax dollars are effectively going towards gay conversion camps^{[citation needed]}. not okay.

10 minutes ago, Edgwyn said:

Some conservatives do not support an expansion of rights (sometimes without justification, sometimes with), but they generally do not go around attempting to curtail existing rights

"hey please treat us like humans" "NO THIS IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE NOW THE PEDOPHILES WILL BE MARRYING TOASTERS AND HAVING POLY RELATIONSHIPS WITH DOGS AND THINK OF THE CHILDREN*" is usually how this goes.

so, the whole "we're not taking rights away, we're just not granting them" argument doesnt hold a lot of water IMO, especially when these minority groups are asking for treatment they should already be getting as human people. saying "no we dont want to give you that" is fairly equal to "we are taking away your human rights".

3 minutes ago, Dikiyoba said:

Question: Is there an option for displaying a public e-mail contact in one's profile information? Perhaps Dikiyoba is just being dumb, but Dikiyoba cannot find a way to do that.

my jabber ident is publicly-listed, and it's startlingly-similar to my email. you could prolly put it in the "filler" fields though.

"Interests: being emailed at dikiyoba@diki.biz"

no diki, it's not trampling minority rights, it's protecting god-fearing Americans from the rapists and pedophiles and drug runners and Mexicans.

i've got 40% unemployment in my former-coal-town hovel in west virginia ever since the mine closed fifty years ago, but it's that damn obama's fault i can't get a job. better defund that libtard money-wasting TVA so i can give all my tax dollars to the rich and it'll trickle down.

22 minutes ago, Dikiyoba said:

 

The concepts and labels of various queer identities are different in different cultures. Think of the hijra of India, or the two-spirits of various Native American tribes. Are hijra trans women, or non-binary? It depends on the individual, when you introduce them to the Western identities. The concepts don't always map well. Or look at how labels and definitions have changed through time in the Western world. Do you separate sexual behavior from sexual identity/attraction? Sexuality from gender? Gender roles/performance from gender identity? Sex from gender? We do in Western cultures (sort of), but historically we didn't always, and some cultures have entirely different ways of looking at these identities. Heck, even the switch from "transsexual" to "transgender" and "trans" happened within a generation, and there are still people who identify as transsexual because that was the most common concept around at the time they were developing their gender identity.

Yeah, I totally agree its a mess trying to reconcile everything. But, at the end of the day it's an argument about labels, and "cis" and "trans" does a pretty good job of generalizing everything down to a usable set of data. Certainly better than a dropdown with 8,000,000 options, which can be a problem when trying to look at demographics and such (especially with a small sample size).

Yeah, lumping some people in with "cis" and "trans" as the only option (which it wasn't, in this case, there were also "neither of those terms" and "?????" for options for transness, and the gender field was M/F/NB/Other, so I'm pretty sure our hijra forumgoers would be able to be at least somewhat-accurately represented) is a bad idea, but for the purposes of this survey, I think it's the best option? This isn't a national census, it's a fun poll for, like, 100 forumgoers.

But, my problem with the original commenter's remarks was not that the language was US-centric (which, yeah, it is, but like 90% of this forum is america, so sorry?) but more that the idea of even suggesting that GSM people exist (by way of giving them a couple radio buttons?) was a political issue. (if this is not the case, i apologize, but that was certainly the gist i got). gay people dont exist in chechnya. there is no war in ba sing se.

You can argue "hey why does this even need to be a thing" and I'd argue by comparison, why does this entire poll need to be a thing, then? Like, the entire purpose of this poll is to look at demographics of the forum population, right?. A thread just came up that suggested we have a disproportionate number of trans people here, so i dont thing anyone would be against a fun question in a fun poll to get some harder data on that than "i remember these people saying they were trans, which is a lot of people compared to the number of people that go into the forums".

this has been: a rant brought to you by sleppy sylae.

8 hours ago, msazad said:

The politics stuff was totally US-centric [...] also to some extent the gender/sexuality stuff

yeah because trans people and gay people dont exist outside of america

?

3 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

Link please?

Not yet it'll probably be on spacebattles/calref/here?/elsewhere pretty soon though. we're trying to get the first big chunk down before releasing anything

3 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

(I also have some recommendations about Worm fanfic I'll post here if anyone interested)

The only Worm fanfic I need to read is THE TECHNO QUEEN. All other fanfic falls short of its terribleness brilliance.

seems fun, but lately i've been a functioning human with no convenient free time. ugh

i might logstalk though if they're published

Yay, an poll

thank you for doing the default options so i could just skip all the stuff about the trash games. that made it real quick and EZ.

3 hours ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

Sylae, is there any chance you'll become active in the development team again?

probably not. you know why. let's not get into it here pls.

4 hours ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

You seem like you're still at least somewhat enthusiastic about the project.

i am.

32 minutes ago, Ambassador to Catland said:

(Note that this isn't deliberately political. It's more just that I'm tired of novels that alienate me with in-your-face sexism just after they start to get interesting.)

I didn't even know the author was a dude until like a fifth of the way through (which doesn't sound like a lot but worm is like ten billion words so). I didn't notice any sexism in the writing at all (which i guess means i'm either oblivious to it or the author is hella good, i dunno), which seems like a miracle given it's a cis dude writing from the perspective of a teenage girl.

Interestingly, based on the way people get superpowers in the universe, there are actually more female capes (heroes and villains) than male. It's pretty close to a 50/50 split in the story iirc, there's a buttload of characters so I can't be bothered to get the exact ratio.

6 minutes ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

Does the Exile Trilogy's license allow for that?

i haven't seen the license (and cant be bothered to look it up) but i would assume (based on presumably-similar licenses i have read) it would be fine as long as you aren't tampering with the original game files or distributing them? just loading doesn't count, so a new "reader" would be fine.