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steam should let you click a “gift-wrap present” button when you gift a game so the recipient has to physically click and pull the wrapping paper away and you can pick between multiple papers and you have the option to triple-wrap it and make it extra annoying
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(via textfromdog)
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(via textfromdog)
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Fucking Carl Sagan 🫶🏽
(via wilwheaton)
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kichoukotori asked:
Hello there! I was wondering, what media inspired cookie clicker to be what it is today? I was thinking of plague inc's "newsboard" which really got me thinking. What sort of games or media do you take inspiration from? Thanks!
Cookie Clicker was initially made for laughs, the whole gameplay loop mostly expanding on the lollipop farm feature in Candy Box:
(as a sidenote, the reason i’ve promised a dungeons minigame for about 10 years now is entirely because Candy Box had them)
the game’s current presentation and design logic stem from the years i spent as a kid playing old macintosh shareware as well as my interest in skeuomorphic UI. if you browse through Macintosh Garden long enough you’re bound to find some of the stuff i obsessed over between 7 and 17 and i’m sure a lot of it has subconsciously found its way into the way i make my games.
some of Cookie Clicker’s major features originate from early player suggestions and from reading discussions about the budding idle game genre, ie. the prestige/ascend system was added after i read people discussing a flash game named Kaguya Table (which involves a feature called “mastery”):
the ascend screen itself takes after Path of Exile’s passive skill tree:
i’ve been asked before where the creepy grandmapocalypse body horror idea comes from and for the most part the answer is i’m just kind of a little freak like that. Cookie Clicker’s initial “made-in-4-hours” version ended with the grandma building going bonkers and replacing the whole background. i’d been into Junji Ito and similar things for some time at that point so turning it into a whole thing for the “i’m making this game seriously actually” version felt like a logical step. pretend the Junji Ito image i’m including is from his gorier stuff
finally, the kitten upgrades and possibly the whole “achievements grant milk” thing were added at the insistent request of a tumblr user who really really wanted me to add cats to the game somehow.
if you were specifically curious about the news ticker at the top of the game, i more or less directly lifted that from the one in SimCity!
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Research finds prediction may be key to eye-and-hand coordination
Have you ever made a great catch—like saving a phone from dropping into a toilet or catching an indoor cat from running outside? Those skills—the ability to grab a moving object—takes precise interactions within and between our visual and motor systems. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester have found that the ability to visually predict movement may be an important part of the ability to make a great catch—or grab a moving object.
“We were able to develop a method that allowed us to analyze behaviors in a natural environment with high precision, which is important because, as we showed, behavioral patterns differ in a controlled setting,” said Kuan Hong Wang, PhD, a Dean’s Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Wang led the study out today in Current Biology in collaboration with Jude Mitchell, PhD, assistant professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, and Luke Shaw, a graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the School of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Rochester. “Understanding how natural behaviors work will give us better insight into what is going awry in an array of neurological disorders.”
Researchers used multiple high-speed cameras and DeepLabCut—an AI method that uses video data to find key points on the hand and arm to measure movements—to record where the primate is looking and the movement of the arm and hand as it reaches and catches moving crickets. Researchers found an 80-millisecond delay in the animal’s visuomotor behavior—the moment when vision and movement click and work together to direct the hand toward the target. Despite this measurable delay, the primates still grabbed the crickets, meaning that they had to predict the cricket’s movement. Using data of both the primates and the crickets the researchers were able to build a detailed model of vision guided reaching behavior.
“These findings allow us to identify unique behavioral control strategies for mechanistic studies and engineering applications,” said Wang. “Visuomotor control problems exist in many neurological disorders due to brain lesions, stroke, and genetic factors. This research may help develop computational behavior analysis strategies to precisely characterize behavioral alterations in naturalistic settings and understand their underlying causes.”
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protogilly-deactivated20231019:
Social Media is on the cusp of Pidgin-ization. If you don’t know or don’t remember, there was a time when instant messaging was heavily fractured across several providers. At some point, instead of juggling 5 or 6 different IM clients, people decided to start making a client that merged all of them into one space – Pidgin.
Now that every major social media site is crashing and burning, there are tons and tons of decentralized alternatives popping up. Mastodon replacing Twitter, Lemmy replacing Reddit, Pixelfed replacing Instagram, etc etc… And all of these new replacements use the same protocol. They all use ActivityPub.
It’s fairly straight forward for someone to make a Social Media Pidgin-style app that merges content from all of these ActivityPub powered services and presents them in one space to eliminate the problem of the new social media sites feeling segmented and sparse.
Have the app facilitate duplicating your profile across services, and then present it all in one spot. Then the user just picks the presentation style they prefer, and the app gathers all of the ActivityPub content they subscribe to, and presents it in that context.
Getting all the content together is very simple, since these sites all use the same protocol/federation system. The hard part is gonna be in design and presentation, making content from different style formats fit into other style formats. But I think it’s all doable. For example, if you prefer Reddit/Lemmy style presentation, it isn’t a big stretch to present Mastodon content in that format. The Lemmy community (subreddit) would just be the federation/instance from Mastodon, and the post is just like any other image or text post to that community. Replies are comments.
The concept is so obvious that I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing something here, like… surely someone’s already working on this right? And if not, why? Is there some hurdle I’m missing? I’d start on it myself, but my programming experience isn’t really in this realm of work. I do industrial and embedded programming. So I can’t help but wonder if maybe there are specific considerations for webdev that make this hard.
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we figured out Roman concrete btw. This is the only thing on my mind
Oh? Do tell?
HOKAY. Doing this in layman’s terms because I could not explain the chemistry in detail if I tried. Pls forgive if I’m a little off in the explanation because idk chem lol
So we’ve been trying to figure out why the fuck Roman concrete has held up so long, right? Our concrete lasts maybe like ten years before it looks like it took a wrecking ball to the face. And even then, our roads suck in general. Universally. Potholes. Everywhere.
Roman concrete has lasted two thousand years. Or more. Depends on where you go.
Now a bunch of scientists took chunks of concrete and threw a bunch of waves at it to figure out the composition, and turns out the concrete has lime in it. At first they were like “Huh, that’s weird, why are these imperfections in this super durable long-lasting concrete?”
So anyways they dismissed the lime, and they also figured out that Roman concrete is suuuuuper strong in water. Like it gets stronger in water. Compare that to our shitty ass concrete. Our concrete suffers in water. It’s shit. Our concrete is a middle-schooler’s newspaper bridge project compared to the Bifrost that is Roman concrete.
Now, because chemical composition is fairly easy to figure out, they found volcanic ash. We don’t have volcanic ash in our concrete (as far as I know), so idk I guess they thought that was the differential factor that made Roman concrete so strong. To my understanding, the Romans used hydraulic mortar rather than aerial mortar. Hydraulic mortar could harden with hydration and reactive silicates, whereas aerial mortar needed exposure to the air and was weaker.
Now, remember those imperfections I mentioned earlier? Lime is very, very weak. You ever felt limestone? Yeah. You get it. So it’s not hard to figure out why we thought these were actually imperfections in otherwise amazing, god-like, S-tier concrete. We used to think it was slaked lime, which is just lime paste.
One of the labs involved in the research developed a chemical mapping technique that allowed them to determine the exact makeup and type of lime present in the concrete. They figured out that this particular form of lime might have been quicklime, which is extremely brittle and very reactive. Quicklime forms at extremely high temperatures. We mix our concrete cold. Another common modern L.
In short, the Romans engineered preferential pathways for faults in the concrete to pass through the lime, which would react to hydration and recrystallize as more lime (calcium carbonate) and heal itself.
This is groundbreaking. I’m so amazed. Here’s the MIT publication, and here’s the journal article.
Ah, I see, road fuseboxes.
Basically yeah! Especially if those fuseboxes are filled with quick hardening foam and look like they were left there by accident, except they’re everywhere so they couldn’t possibly be an accident.
Apparently they’re already working on methods of adapting this kind of concrete for modern use. We could potentially fix the US’s crumbling infrastructure and simultaneously upgrade to vastly superior long-lasting materials.
@corrodedcoffindisbanded it’s 8:30am this made me laugh so hard I woke up
cc: @petermorwood
(via wilwheaton)
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Transmission #58868 from SBIRS GEO-5 (ACCM)
1. Burrow of Spiderwebs
2. Elvish Pain
