I Will Ask You Questions - Now with MORE fantasy ecology!

oh, right, seeing as I answered my last one: hit me up

Hah, I went and googled tantalum after Elps' answer to his own question where he said he'd be a tantalum-mancer, which led me to conflict resources, of which tantalum is an example with a wide variety of uses - most notably in the high-durability capacitors of consumer electronics like smartphones,video game consoles, cameras and computers.

Gold mining and its profits is still the main financial contributor to ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but tantalum mining is a key component as well. Basically we can't fucking win under capitalism

Imagine that you are a consultant / marketer for a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting sex positivism. How would you promote sex positivism in a country of your choice whose culture is different from your own, and how would your tactics vary based on your budget (with near-limitless resources on the high end, and only enough money for a locally-oriented campaign on the low end)?

Well, personally I think that my top concerns would be to promote safe sex and to spread information on how to prevent STDs and on the importance of consent.

With a limited budget, I'd probably start off by sending out small care packages of free condoms and information packets, particularly to many countries in sub-saharan Africa with long standing histories of STD spread.

With a much larger budget, we could greatly increase the quality and quantity of said care packages. Maybe we could even try to get some people on the local newspapers/radios/television shows to help promote sex positivity as well. And I'm sure that recruiting some local citizens to help us out as well wouldn't hurt.

And with a completely unlimited limited budget, we could probably spread our message of sex positivity AND destroy the economies of every country in the world in one decisive blow! (We're nonprofit of course, so none of that economics stuff really concerns us anyway.)

give me a question appropriate to my level of maturity.

(pretty dang low)

give me the most awkward personal question you can. yes ill answer it.

Values, for the purpose of this question, refer to the principles which govern your actions and determine what actions you see as ethical. These tend to be nebulous ideas, like 'equity' or 'social good,' and are often difficult to measure. What criteria do you use to determine if your own actions are in line with your values, and when (if ever) do you consider the values of others?

Ooooooh boy, my values aren't very set in stone, I tend to look at a disagreement and decide who is the bigger asshole at a quick glance. This occasionally leads to me saying things I later regret, but usually trusting my many guts has done me well so far. I guess if I had to put a label on them, my biggest values would be "peace in the world", or more specifically, "peace in the world where everybody understands eachother and doesn't keep stuff to themselves just so said peace can be kept", which isn't very specific a label I guess, but a descriptive one.

Really the main thing I think about when I'm doing something is "does doing this make people uncomfortable or have a high chance to piss people off?". I try to let people know if they're doing something that would piss me off or make me uncomfortable, while doing this I tend to try and not insult their values, should I know them at the same time, because that's just rude and agressive. We need more upfront people I think, not aggressive, just upfront. The world is way to passive aggressive.

Piester, I think you are asking for too much.

Anyway I'm pretty sure I'm winning at this thread, gimme another question!

Imagine that you are asked to consult for a fantasy strategy game as an adviser on how to make the actions of players impact the ecosystems of the game. What features and game mechanics would you suggest for the developers to implement in order to create a reactive ecosystem? You may use any fantasy setting as the basis for the game.

What would help instill the feelings of urgency in a turn based game without using real world time at all as a game mechanic?

The timer just went off on the oven for your delicious steak and you're only halfway through an online game of Advance Wars. Will you betray your friends for the delicious steak or let it burn for the sake of friendship?????

Or, in the case where no time is involved at all, perhaps the overwhelming eagerness to get the next best thing in the tech tree before your opponents so that you can be the one stomping around Mars in a giant death machine.

May I please have a question?

oh, right, seeing as I answered my last one: hit me up

When is it appropriate to lie to children, and how do you judge when they are mature enough for hard truths?

give me a question appropriate to my level of maturity.

(pretty dang low)

Given access to just about any tools, how would one find the most interesting thing to disassemble, and what would one learn by doing so?

May I please have a question?

What is the best way to practice describing emotion for fiction, and how do fictional descriptions differ from trying to explain real feelings to a partner or psychologist?

Piester, I think you are asking for too much.

What non-religious visual symbol do you think has made the largest impact on the world and why?

May I please have a question?

What is the best way to practice describing emotion for fiction, and how do fictional descriptions differ from trying to explain real feelings to a partner or psychologist?

Well there are a few ways to go about conveying/describing emotion in fiction, and I wouldn't be so arrogant as to assume I know which is best. Instead, I'll just say that I really do enjoy Hemingway's style of writing without (much) adverb or adjective. Everything is in the action with him, and the way you see emotion is in the behavior of the characters. By showing us the right "Visual" information, we are queued in to what the character might feel, and without a concrete narrative definition of the mental state of the characters, we actually are able to form a more nuanced explanation in our heads, as we want to fill the space the author has left us.

I would say when explaining emotion to a partner or psychologist, you want to be as open and clear as possible, so describing whatever emotions you're feeling or think you're feeling is a good way to go about it. This couldn't be more different from the Hemingway writing style, but you're not trying to write a story, you're trying to make your own emotions accessible to both you and the person you're speaking with.

Thx for the question, hope I didn't mess it up too bad

Bridgekeeper,

I am not afraid.

Piester, I think you are asking for too much.

What non-religious visual symbol do you think has made the largest impact on the world and why?

Two small black circles intersect a larger black circle. They're almost tangent, but not quite. At first you might think it looks like a Venn Diagram, but there's nothing in there. It is incomprehensible when interpreted as a Venn Diagram, so I'm going to deconstruct it a different way.

It's similar to the taoist Taijitu in its simplicity, but visually distinct. Unlike the Taijitu, there is no white. Opposites do not interlock. There is only darkness and the negative space that surrounds it. Though some of us may be big or small, we are all the same. We are all hateful and cruel. But the hate of the powerful has greater reach, more impact, and all around is larger, though the percentage of hate within all of us is the same.

The majority, in this symbol, are the most powerful. The small circles, both a fourth of the mass as the big one, both aspire to become powerful like the big circle. They are blind to the existence of the other small circle. They don't try to get closer to each other. They don't repel each other. They simply exist parallel, oblivious.

Who do we root for in this conflict? The big one, of course. The two underdogs are indistinguishable so there's no appeal to prefer one small circle over another, and certainly not over the big circle. But at the same time, the image would look incredibly bland if the big circle assimilated both small circles into its mass. The big circle is only large because we can compare it to the smaller circles. It is not enough to succeed; others must fail. And since the big circle is more appealing with the smaller circles intersecting it, there they stay, keeping the big circle from being just an ordinary circle.

I like looking at this symbol. It appeals to my dark inner nature, which is also my inner child. My inner child is happy, so awaking the child makes me happy. It almost looks like a head, but I don't have two protrusions jutting out near the top of my skull. I think this is where human evolution is headed in the next million years.

Second place goes to that S with six parallel lines.

Bridgekeeper,

I am not afraid.

How would a species that relied on burning things rather than digesting them directly develop, and what would their society look like? Magic is okay if you need a cop-out or can come up with something more interesting by using it, as long as the system by which magic operates is explained.

Imagine that you are asked to consult for a fantasy strategy game as an adviser on how to make the actions of players impact the ecosystems of the game. What features and game mechanics would you suggest for the developers to implement in order to create a reactive ecosystem? You may use any fantasy setting as the basis for the game.

Adding extra complexity/"realism" to a game system is obviously going to give a player something additional to think about, which makes you have to ask why you're bothering to add it. Realism's well and good but I assume you'd want to add an ecosystem to demonstrate your foster civilisation's connection to the world and its ecosystem.

For instance in a role-playing game, carry limits are featured in most systems to limit the tools a player/character has at their immediate disposal when faced with a challenge. It's an utterly arbitrary limit set, and it might be to make the early game a challenge (compared to the later game when you can either increase your carry weight or pay other things to carry your stuff or whatever), to generally highlight your character's vulnerability, etc.

Strategy games in general require the gathering of resources (material resources plus territory) and depriving "enemies" of said resources, assuming said resources are finite or have some manner of cap in their production. You'll use those resources to more efficiently extract/secure resources from the environment, until you "win" at some point. Fantasy (as I think of it) heavily features themes of exploration and expansion, whether you're a village in a fertile valley or a young space base on a new planet.

The easiest way to show interactions would be the effects of changing land use as you exploit the land for the basic resource, food. Food could immediately have consequences if you control units at the individual level; for example in a patch of forest you could choose to harvest mushrooms/nuts/fruit (subject to seasonal availability), or hunt herbivores. Altering the amount of "food" in the forest would also influence "predator" numbers; a depletion of herbivores may run the risk of the local predator switching to attacking your units. If it's an apex predator, you might have the option of destroying its habitat and hoping it moves elsewhere - strategic clearcutting might allow you to isolate it if killing it might yield rewards, or funneling it out of your territory through natural corridors.

You could do this in non-forest habitats, too - fish stocks can be modelled pretty easily and yield could decrease over time in response to over-fishing (little fish get tossed back; the population adapts over time so fish that are genetically predisposed to be large a likelier to get picked off. Over time, catching the same number of fish yields less food).

Converting wildland to farmland also offers the possibility of diminishing returns as soil productivity drops, forcing you to extract "productivity" from other areas, again potentially displacing megapredators (dragon dung is a superior fertiliser, but you run the risk each time of losing adventurers to a territorial dragon!)

All this works pretty well for a non-magical medieval setting, but toss magic in and things could certainly get interesting. If you had leylines woven across the world in a state of equilibrium at gamestart, and Wizard Towers or other nodes of magical activity would disrupt them, the weave could shift and a previously magic-starved valley full of innocuous owlcats could have a spontaneous griffin infestation (which then shuts off a key trade route, or I dunno I'm spitballing). If the core mechanic of the game was about the mastery of the world's magic, these infestations could be attributed to random events until the player "researches" enough to begin mapping leylines and eventually being able to predict their response to added magical nodes. Actually, a grid-based game where you toss a bunch of towns and mountains and animal populations, randgen some pre-existing leylines, then mess around with wizard tower placement sounds pretty neat - kind of like Go meets Catan with more dragons. Someone should get on that.


Another, please!

Another, please!

Per the recent IRC discussion - When posed with the question 'support or refute the idea that the human condition is improving' what would you use as an objective measurement for determining quality of life?

all the ideas in the irc were pretty good

i'd go with measuring level of wealth of the least wealthy portion of society (maybe the bottom 10% or so??), as well as checking the lowest possible access to necessities (food, clean water, healthcare, maybe education and telecommunication) outside of the immediate aftermath of a disaster

all the ideas in the irc were pretty good

i'd go with measuring level of wealth of the least wealthy portion of society (maybe the bottom 10% or so??), as well as checking the lowest possible access to necessities (food, clean water, healthcare, maybe education and telecommunication) outside of the immediate aftermath of a disaster

How do you prepare food to give the most people the most hedons per time spent preparing said food without the use of substances officially classified as drugs?

i hiked here from the ocean floor to receive a question

How do you prepare food to give the most people the most hedons per time spent preparing said food without the use of substances officially classified as drugs?

step 1: hijack an ice cream truck
step 2: use a megaphone to announce to everyone that youre giving away free ice cream
step 3: give away free ice cream

source: wikihow

i hiked here from the ocean floor to receive a question

If you were to be incredibly famous, what audience would you be best known with and what causes or products would you promote to them?

my audience would probably be the kind of people who watch video games on youtube

That's cause video games are like, all I ever do, so if anything it would be that, I think, not that I really plan on doing that. But if i did... I would use my powers for good! And try to make the video game world less shitty