FunkyStuff

Maybe I'm biased because the only event I go to is mostly attended by the elderly, but I swear I go months at a time without ever seeing anyone else using at least an N95 mask. Maybe 5 or 6 people out of 100 wearing cloth masks. About 15% of the population has their vaccines up to date where I am. How the hell is any kind of organizing or solidarity supposed to happen when people can't be bothered to put a piece of fabric on their face? It really feels like nihilism and cynicism completely envelop the population that the literal smallest act of social good is too much to ask for.

I miss when anti mask conspiracy theories where fringe instead of being the hegemonic narrative.

This kind of thing makes me think that the only way for socialism to win in the west is to promise people their personal lives will be better and they'll have more treats, but we obviously can't beat imperialism as the treat fiends' choice.

If you've been interested in PoE before and bounced off, next week is a great time to try it again! The whole game is being changed. Some more info here

Brought to you by the brilliant mind behind Love Me I'm A Liberal 2021 Edition

Disambiguation:

Belts going straight into buildings a la Satisfactory, Create in modded MC, or Mindustry. Buildings usually have slots that allow you to plug a belt into them.

Inserters/mechanical arms that take items off a belt and insert them into buildings like Factorio, or Dyson Sphere Program

My own thoughts:

Inserters and mechanical arms are generally a cleaner system since setting up assembly lines you just have belts running parallel to machines. The case for belts that directly go into/out of buildings is that it makes the math for throughout a lot simpler because there is only 1 rate in the distribution to worry about. Games where inserters have stacking, different speeds, variable throughput depending on destination, etc... have annoyed me a fair amount so I like the straightforwardness of having a belt that carries 120 items/min no matter what.

A pretty important thing to note is that 2d factory games are gonna struggle with a direct belt access mechanic since it means belts have to go through each other a lot, diagram below

[12] [12] [12]   
-/|---/|---/|  
--/----/----/

The belts in the 2nd line have to cut through the first. In 3D that's not a problem since you can just stack the lines vertically instead, but in 2D you have to use whatever mechanic the game has to go above or below existing lines. I think this is the main reason the inserter mechanic is most common, but some games like Mindustry solved this problem neatly and allow you to easily pass items in multiple directions. Dyson Sphere Program also has direct belt inputs for a few buildings where only 1 input is needed, but DSP allows belts to easily cross over each other in 3D space, it just doesn't allow stacking assemblers vertically like in other 3D games.

Another solution for 2D games with direct access belts is to allow for the building itself to act as a kind of junction. Final Factory (an underhyped new release) has this system where you run your belts like this:

[1]--[1]--[1]
[2]--[2]--[2]

And as a building fills up, it starts passing the overflow to the next one. This means as long as you feed the first building in the chain with enough items to stock the whole line, you'll be fine. Then you can take the products out the bottom or sometimes you can fit another line through the crafters to take the output from the assembly line.

Also, another thing, some games use neither system because they rely on other systems for transporting items, like units that automatically carry them. I haven't played any games like that outside of modded Minecraft with Thaumcraft golems and Pneumaticraft drones, so feel free to give your thoughts on those (I think Oddsparks works this way? Haven't tried it yet).

Who are some people that started out as ghouls and made a turn for the better? Bonus points if it came suddenly and from their own realization.

I thought about this for a while and the ones I could come up with aren't really that good.

• Emperor Puyi.
• Jeffrey Sachs went from doing shock therapy to Russia to defending their right to defend against NATO expansionism on a lib news show, but that's been his only good moment to my knowledge.
• Jimmy Carter but he never changed course when he needed to, not much he can do to undo the harm he did as president.
• Patty Hearst but she really wasn't doing anything bad, just came from a wealthy and powerful family much like Puyi.
• Pat Tillman was deployed when he had a change of heart and contacted a bunch of reporters, sadly he was killed by another troop before he got to make much of a difference.
• Peter Daou but he's largely irrelevant
• That natsec ghoul that wrote the article about quitting her job because she doesn't want to be complicit in genocide.
• Whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning? I don't know off the top of my head how involved she ever was with the war on terror, but she was a troop.
• Malala and Greta were never ghouls, but did grow from lib media darlings to over time so honorable mention to both of them.

I guess the most obvious example that does satisfy my criteria is Kissinger, who really popped off when he died.

edit: You do not, in fact, have to hand it to Puyi before he was re-educated.