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...