Datum by Datum

A Day in the Life By Eric Baggs Only by the end of the day did Indolo use his hands for manual labor, strengthening his body in a recreation of old-time activities. “Deadlifting” they called it back then. It made him tire quickly and he welcomed his bed. The cochlear biosynthetic implant in his right ear softly hummed Indolo to wakefulness promptly when he wished to wake. Precognitive analysis had come a long way since nanoprocessors became ubiquitous. He slipped on his adaptive jumpsuit and chose a design he had put together a few weeks ago. It had a simple blocky aesthetic of orange and teal as accents over dark grey. He hadn’t allocated for the vismat modules that changed the visible location of material, but he thought most of those outfits ended up ugly anyway. It was the middle of the week for Indolo’s work schedule so he was partway through a hobby project of constructing a miniature arcology. The vismat modules really were trifles when compared to upgradi...

Coercing someone disregards their viewpoint. The decision to undergo coercive practices is complex and problematic, but at least know that you are depriving yourself of a perspective with potentially valuable insights by supplanting it with your own. I am going to challenge your posts. I want you to be right. I'm trying to make you right by challenging the points I have the evidence to challenge. If you don't like it, I don't mind speaking to you in private, but I believe in honesty and transparency to the point of willingly overcompensating with single voices in an arena of many (including my own). If you still don't like it, you can ask me to stop and give a short or a long reason for me to consider. I probably won't stop, but it will be valuable information. I also prize a civil discourse, so I try to never make people feel belittled, disenfranchised, or ashamed. I respect you as long as you're in my plane of reality. That's a wide swath. See you late...

Lately I've been watching loads of Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation . It made me really want to play an RPG that allowed people to explore that type of wonder in space. Star Trek's episodic approach is what separates it from being a pure space opera. That's an oversimplification, but helps to frame why I love and enjoy Star Trek. You can estimate the budget of any Star Trek show like The Next Generation or Enterprise by looking at the fake rock walls that exist on every single planet. The starting point of these walls is obviously fabric and paint, but the ending point is an alien world. For anyone who can suspend their disbelief, the optimism of Star Trek makes the kitsch of Star Trek feel just a bit more genuine. I've been working on making a tabletop RPG that is largely inspired by these things. The goal is to convey Star Trek's characteristic optimism and wonder while allowing the players to build characters that they can rely on, bo...

No Man's Sky is a perplexing game. It plays out like a slowly unraveling mystery in both gameplay mechanics and narrative. Ignoring the vast majority of the pre-release hype, the game appealed to my taste for exploration and the basic gameplay loop is relaxing enough to pair with the interstelllar exploration goal that takes up the bulk of the game. Cool Ghosts produced an analysis of No Man's Sky that I largely agree with. This game however is like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series in that your mileage may vary. Buying in to the world is far more of a necessity in NMS than it is in a Bethesda game, but the concept is the same. That being said, Sean Murray is captain of a mysterious and terribly frustrating ship. I have no idea what to expect in terms of support for the game in the form of content patches or DLC. I have grown tired of the current iteration of NMS. I have little to no respect for absolute silence, all I need is a single tentative timeline talking about what...

I'm going to outline a few scenarios that do not absolutely  require instruction, but good instruction makes these situations far more worthwhile: Learning Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for the first (or first in a long while) time. Not just learning about disciplines like chemistry, physics, and statistics as a base for understanding natural phenomena, but directly applying them. Learning a creative art-making skill such as sketching with charcoal or learning how to do 3D modelling. Interlocking Morasses D&D is a morass of systems that interact with one another in order to develop a coherent story from the combination of three things: the motivations of its players (including the Dungeon Master), the statistics and attributes of its characters, and the resolution of conflict through randomness via dice rolling. Clearly they influence each other outside of the probability space where dice determine the outcome, if you don't attack the guard you won'...

Any community that is focused on a creative task is a great opportunity for learning life skills to do with cooperation and productivity. As a wee lad, I got dangerously deep into Warcraft III and its expansion The Frozen Throne. I played for probably thousands of hours and spent a a good amount of time in its modding tools. I produced very little playable content but learned a great deal about the logic of computer programming, the artistry of textures in video games, and how to overcome limitations like low-poly models. Having to learn about these topics and having experiences with them allowed me to participate in communities and learn about skill-building in incredibly formative ways. Classic Warcraft III. How I remember it. Limitations like low-poly models are really not that big of a deal in a real-time strategy game like Warcraft III. The more polygons you have, the more points of data are used to define the features of a three dimensional shape. Generally, you can j...

Designing a setting for a campaign is a rather daunting task. You can take several approaches to this, with one end of the spectrum being insanely detailed to the point of ecological information being established and the other end just being a typical fantasy world that transplants existing setting rules. I went with the former, because I don't know how to pick tasks that are of a reasonable scope. Using the Savage Worlds system, one of the worlds that I came up with for an RPG campaign that I ran was a small-ish continent in a world of haphazard magic along various ley lines. The premise was that people from Earth were reborn in this place with no memory of their prior life. As time went on their memories slowly returned and as the ages progressed eventually every life that came to Tharstradt was through a newborn that inherited memories instead of being born as an adult in a mysterious shrine towards the center of the continent. Understandably, it can be very hard to get a fe...

Pokemon GO is bad. Pokemon is ripe for the most amazing "social" gaming experience of all time. Just let them battle each other and don't screw with the existing formula that WORKS. Ahhhhh... Really though, knowledge of the underlying systems (mostly due to modding games and learning how to use GIS software) means that I can conceive of both the mechanics they utilize as well as how they got there from a design perspective. They want eyes on their app and they're going to do it with an interminable power creep as the generations of pokemon are added over time, mark my words. Instead of focusing on pokemon the game to use as a template, they're using it as a brand to market their existing formula. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who likes to learn about app development, but it is still mightily disappointing to anyone excited for a real life pokemon game. Judging by the player base of this broken game, that audience seems to be quite massive. As ...

I like the idea of blogging, sharing your inner thoughts (although generally not innermost) with an audience consisting of something between 0 and 7,000,000,000 people. But holy hell does it prey on your anxieties and insecurities. Throughout the years my reading of articles and blogs and thinkpieces on the internet has gotten through several dozen different instances of an author confessing about his or her hypercritical inner voices. I've personally wondered if those sorts of tendencies are almost necessary for becoming a writer of any substance. While I am not sure I honestly believe that being hypercritical of yourself is necessary, I do think that having that trait is the rule rather than the exception. Just the number of blog posts I have thoroughly absorbed which discuss suicidal depressive tendencies led me to that conclusion. I try to ruminate on something like that, because I believe that depression is a complex state of mind which requires nuance to weave into a func...

I am a humanist. So much so that I can barely understand why one would not want to be a humanist. As someone focused on humans and their wellbeing/function I really love ecology and how its principles translate to economics and back again. The two theoretical frameworks reinforce one another beautifully. Okay, one person helping another is seen as a good thing. It follows that if everyone helps everyone else, everyone has a good thing done for them. That's (mostly) the extent of my general philosophy on life. My goals and hopes revolve around the idea that everyone should be trying to better what they can as much as they can. Everything should be getting better all the time, and if it is not we must try to make it so. Complacency is death. In the natural world, species always face the dilemma of a changing environment to some significant degree. I don't mean something like seasonally, but rather evolutionarily. The only species that don't face this dilemma are the ext...

There are quite a few ways of getting a bleak look at the world in 2016. One is to follow the media's schizophrenic coverage of police shootings. Another is to look at the many awesome instances of uncontrollable deforestation and pollution that humans create. One can also just look to modern politics in the western world and assume that it's a hopeless mess. But don't worry! The world has been facing all of these issues for decades. Wait, that doesn't comfort you? Yeah, it doesn't help anybody who goes to a university to get an education in anything related to environmental science, ecology, or urban planning either. Environmental science curricula inherently focuses on solving or preventing damages to the environment, you spend most of your time looking at past failures as a result. Ecology is mostly in the same boat except even more complex and is often concerned with species that are facing extinction (or that have already gone extinct in the wild). ...

The metaphor of a two-edged sword applies very well to modern science. Besides the obvious stories of Dr. Mengele or the Manhattan project, where both projects involved ended up doing great harm regardless of intention, social media is the new hot stuff that can warp our interpretations of new scientific discovery. News media by itself has had a tumultuous history with covering science. This blog post  by Jonathan Eisen highlights an interesting case of modern government programs engaging with science. Long before any real results come out of projects like these, reporters pick up on the story and try to sell it to their audience to varied results. John Oliver took on science reporting in popular media and Phil Plait's take on it  makes it very easy to apply the two-edged sword metaphor. We have way more capability than ever before to disseminate information and stimulate scientific discourse. We are also way more likely to pick up only bits and pieces of complex issues,...

I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun 's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular. A person... ...in a place. It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make s...

How much more precise are we thanks to Einstein and the development of rocketry? I've been taught that before the proliferation of the Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System (NAVSTAR GPS) when you took a sample from a site, such as aquatic invertebrates from a watershed, the standard procedure was to name the site as best you could which mostly meant putting the name of the body of water down or describing local landmarks. As I'm sure you can imagine, this just isn't a very precise way of marking where you took a sample from. As GPS the technology has developed and as the satellites that enable its precision have been launched into orbit in greater and greater numbers, resulting in greater and greater precision, policies have also enabled non-military use of GPS to be more precise by turning off civilian uses' selective imprecision. (You can read more about the history of GPS here .) The technology behind GPS is becoming so popular and wid...

The very first blog. Here we go. I hope that I can do a bunch of a half-assed dissections of complex systems, but really I'm just gonna rip pieces of stuff and plug it into my endless log of ideas for RPG campaigns. Alternatively let's look at ants, plants, and ecology to tear apart their systems in a haphazard manner too. Either way it should be interesting. See you later.