Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-03-22T22:00:50Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com March 22. http://ranprieur.com/#7077ae1a9775c2356d40996a41b41e8c4e7dbba3 2024-03-22T22:00:50Z March 22. Quick loose end on gaming. The game Rogue, back in 1980, had procedurally generated dungeons, monsters, and treasures. With how far AI has come, it should already be possible for a game to have procedurally generated NPCs, dialogue, and quests. Surely humans can still do it better, but I love the idea of an open world RPG where you're not just choosing a path on a decision tree, but going where no player has gone before.

Posted to the subreddit, Recessions Actually Make People Live Longer. The reason seems to be pollution. So we could get the same benefits without a recession, just with urban design that doesn't favor cars. Related: Paris cycling numbers double in one year thanks to massive investment

Also from the subreddit, The hunter-gatherers of the 21st century who live on the move. It's mainly about the social benefits: "staying mobile is a deliberate choice because it enables large and complex societies -- societies that look more like mobile constellations than villages or cities." Related: Europe's last hunter-gatherers had sophisticated societies that helped them avoid inbreeding

Loosely related to nomadism, my latest obsession is the visual experience of zooming through a landscape. I'm doing it in Fallout, trying to do it with closed eye visuals, and now I'm looking for videos that do it with drone footage. The best one I've found is 6 Minutes Of Mountain Surfing in Norway. Yesterday I got high and watched it on half speed while listening to Hildegard von Bingen.

]]> March 20. http://ranprieur.com/#e2550fdd7b96203a665d42d49d55d629732b8ed2 2024-03-20T20:40:57Z March 20. Continuing on Fallout, games are often judged on their story, which usually means following a path through social interactions: I met this person, I did this quest, I joined this faction. Fallout New Vegas has more options for this kind of story. But Fallout 4 has more game mechanics that generate stories on other levels. For example:

I couldn't beat the raiders in the Corvega plant, so I snuck in through a pipe, used a dose of Jet to get past a turret, and did a lucky headshot on the leader to complete the quest -- using a .308 bullet, which are rare, so I have to save them for important shots. By now, I had a ton of loot stashed in the Sanctuary root cellar, and still hadn't found a merchant. So I took the Lone Wanderer perk, enabling me to carry more stuff, and I loaded up and did a straight run all the way to Diamond City. I used the postman hat to raise my endurance so I could sprint past enemies without fighting them, and at one point some two-headed deer ran with me. Then in the city I used fancy clothing and a dose of Day Tripper to boost my charisma, so I could get a better deal in bartering, and came out with some good chest armor and a deadly laser pistol. To make better use of it, my next perk should be Sneak.

Again, this "story" that emerges organically from good game design, is more fun for me than a "story" of pre-coded character stuff. But on a tangent to social philosophy, I wonder about the popularity of pre-coded character stuff. There are a lot of games where you join a faction and the faction gives you quests, and I think this is filling a need that could be filled in the real world, if it were designed better. The "factions" in modern society, from corporations to religions to nation states, tend to be predatory toward their own members.


my Fallout 4 character]]> March 18. http://ranprieur.com/#53afec64dcb9bcb3a5357ab9a1dbd1a705547a20 2024-03-18T18:20:11Z March 18. This blog is going to fizzle out if I don't start writing about subjects other than subjects I've written about in the past on which I have nothing new to say. Today, video games, but first some philosophy. What is the point of being human? More precisely, given that reality is full of all kinds of beings living all kinds of lives, what can I experience, as a modern human, that is rare and unusual in the whole scope of creation? Maybe, instead of trying to change society so that future humans can live more like squirrels, I should be asking, if a squirrel got to live as me, how would it have the most fun?

My favorite PC game franchise is Fallout, a post-nuclear RPG set decades to centuries in the future, with retrofuturistic aesthetics. I've played Fallout 2 and 3, and after 3, the developers split into two camps, which made Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4. By waiting for them to go on sale on GOG.com, I've finally been able to play both for under $20.

It seems like most people prefer New Vegas for its superior story, characters, and dialogue. But if I want that stuff, I'll read a novel. What I want in a game is to wander at random around an open world dotted with "dungeons" -- places I can optionally go into to fight baddies and get loot. Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas make the landscape subservient to the story. The 2D map is often a 1D maze, where buildings or slopes block you (unrealistically) from just going anywhere, until you find the one path through by doing a quest. I haven't run into that problem yet in Fallout 4.

It also has the best character face sculpting I've seen so far. My only complaint is that the combat is really hard. I can't give my character high enough agility to make up for my low agility as a player, so I'm constantly getting killed and going back to saved games, and running away from opponents I still can't beat with many attempts. My long-term goal is to defeat all outdoor enemies so I can just run around.

I don't usually enjoy gaming while high, but I've discovered that running around a well-rendered game world while high is better in some ways than going for a walk in a physical world constrained by cars and fences. Also, the visual experience is a big help for my continuing experimentation with CEVs.

]]> March 13. http://ranprieur.com/#9c68d67563e3e880f7858780196684647d545843 2024-03-13T13:30:54Z March 13. No ideas this week. But here's an interesting post on The Luddite blog, viewing technology through a three dimensional axis of Need, Want, and Agency, and partly inspired by a project I started and didn't finish.

Also, I've added a few more short reviews to my now-archived post about 2023 movies, including three from Japan: Perfect Days (8/10), Monster (9/10) and Godzilla Minus One (10/10).

]]> March 11. http://ranprieur.com/#98f909008019de2d7b1464d9c27ec1cc22a31d49 2024-03-11T23:10:43Z March 11. Science links. Controversial new theory of gravity rules out need for dark matter:

Oppenheim's theory envisages the fabric of space-time as smooth and continuous (classical), but inherently wobbly. The rate at which time flows would randomly fluctuate, like a burbling stream, space would be haphazardly warped and time would diverge in different patches of the universe. The theory also envisions an intrinsic breakdown in predictability.

More astronomy, a new model of Tidal Locking, in which the same side of a planet is always facing the sun. It now appears that this will not make the bright side a sterile desert. Air currents would distribute heat and bring clouds to block the sun, and the global climate could even be more stable than a rotating planet.

Surprising link observed between body temperature and depression. "The researchers found that higher levels of depressive symptoms were consistently associated with higher body temperatures." The causality is still unknown, but it's possible that making yourself hot, to "engage the body's self-cooling mechanisms", or just making yourself cold, could reduce depression.

Finally, a fascinating Twitter post arguing that prehistoric venus statues "were likely made by women who were examining their own bodies and sculpting them from their own first person POV", with images showing how this explains the exaggerated proportions.

]]> March 8. http://ranprieur.com/#1ce008c2b623172212b454361cf00b8ea9df237b 2024-03-08T20:40:00Z March 8. Continuing on the subject of integrating technology with freedom, a new comic, What Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future. The point is not to blindly resist technology, but to carefully choose our technologies to optimize quality of life instead of accumulation of capital.

A few more links. I spend £8500 a year to live on a train

Via No Tech Magazine, a cool page about Songs made directly from sunlight, with small solar panels connected to sound-making electronics.

And from the subreddit, The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants. Something I noticed, going back to my hometown after 30 years, was that while the edges had been pushed out with McMansions, the old part of town was actually wilder, with bigger trees, restoration of the river, and a culture of letting lawns get scruffy or replacing them with native plants.

]]> March 5. http://ranprieur.com/#cf46a8d5bdde8ae53b0904b72aa1ee30129153f3 2024-03-05T17:10:19Z March 5. Another quote from a book I'm reading, Morris Berman's Wandering God:

What Woodburn discovered in Tanzania was that the Hadza do not experience any severe food shortages and that they are unconcerned about the future. Although all Hadza consider themselves to be kin, they have few obligations to each other and are not bound by commitments. Everyone has direct access to valued assets, and this provides security for all. Dependency, let alone hierarchy, is not part of the Hadza way of life. What is perhaps the popular image of hunter-gatherer societies -- close, warm, communities that are simultaneously very supportive and very conformist/restrictive -- may be off the mark. Instead, what we often find is a great deal of autonomy and independence.

I haven't written about this stuff in a while, but my position hasn't changed. Just as you need an empty container to carry water, the foundation of all freedom is the freedom to do nothing. The fact that this has been achieved by hunter-gatherers, and not by modernity, should not discourage us from technological ambitions.

Here's a fun question. How far can we go with an all-volunteer economy? Can we go to space? There would be plenty of volunteers to build the rockets, not so many to mine the ore.

Related, a classic essay, The Economics of Star Trek.

]]> March 3. http://ranprieur.com/#b4422e58a07472283843a770ab3113543cfe2fb6 2024-03-03T15:50:53Z March 3. I'm reading a lot of books this year, mostly about anthropology or weird stuff. This is from the latter category, The Real World of Fairies by Dora Van Gelder, about tree spirits:

They learn from the cell life within their own bark the difficulties of survival. They see the life around them and know death intimately, as the trees next to them often fall and die. But the trees learn through all this experience that life never dies and is never wasted. They cannot move about and therefore we think of them as having less life experience, but that is where we are mistaken. It is not through rushing about that one learns, but from taking into oneself the experiences from without and thus feeling the pulse of life beating within. Humanity tries to escape from experience which is often suffering. When it rains we go to shelter; when death comes we put away the sight of it. The trees let life beat against them, and try to withstand it.

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