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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.

    For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.

    If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10-11*9*1013)/75².

    That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.

    My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.


  • This is also probably off topic because I can’t load the YouTube video.

    I was talking about the second Dune film a little while back and saying how much I enjoy a well realised world that doesn’t try to convey itself by comparing itself to ours. I get the same feeling watching Dune and Lord of the Rings as I do when I watch a film from a culture I’m not familiar with; a sense of needing to adjust to their way of storytelling.

    Pairing this with what you mention which is basically extra subtle show don’t tell, and you end up with something I absolutely adore, which is a story in a fully realised culture I know nothing about, that understands that the bare minimum amount of that culture I need to understand to fully enjoy the story can be the best amount to have.

    I was going to say how rare this is but thinking about it, it actually isn’t. Tolkien’s cosmology is fully realised and vast yet I learnt basically no fluff about the world that wasn’t necessary to the story. Sometimes I just had to make peace with the fact that I didn’t understand the cultural context, I could only measure it’s importance in the attitude of the characters.

    That’s the shit I love.







  • This may only be an opinion I have but often I feel that narrative in RPGs is actually two slightly more distinct styles; I’ll call them immersive and performative, but I presume somebody else has already named them.

    I think 10 candles is one of the few systems that sets it’s sights on immersive narrative play. This is, imo, the hardest thing to pull off in any TTRPG and I envy eny player who can reach this style easily. 10 candles may make you actually afraid and feel hopeless in a way few other games can.

    Madness in my opinion is a performative narrative mechanic. As a player you don’t feel compelled to act mad in their own fear, but are responding to a mechanic to continue to set the tone. Gumshoe in general and F.A.T.E too for that matter are top of the class for narrative TTRPGs, but they target the performative side.

    I first came across this when I was playing D&D and could recognise that all my players preferred roleplaying to anything else, but when we tried F.A.T.E, it didn’t gel with two of them. We’d been falling into a common pattern which was three of us would basically perform to create the immersive experience for the remaining two, in the process all getting what we all wanted. This only worked because the 5e narrative mechanics are basically three skills that are only called for at the DM’s discretion, which was then being called for less for the immersed players in favour of actually just weighing their arguements. Then in F.A.T.E and gumshoe, the additional guidance for roleplay actually locks players into performative pkay.

    There isn’t too much in 10 candles that actually disrupts the immersive style of roleplay. Anything that is properly introduced as “who your character is” rather than “what your character is doing” can support this style of play, and is particularly strong for prompts introduced in the character creation stage. These prompts should also be few and far between, so they never limit natural choices and bring the character out of immersion. I just don’t know if madness can do that.

    That’s all my opinion, I’m not a game designer beyond GMing my own systems, and I may be totally wrong.


    All of this said, I do think my biggest issue with ten candles is that when the game is down to one candle, the tone change from “the tragic tale of the hopeless acts of humanity in an inevitably ending world” to “everyone gets killed off one by one”, is solved by making the ticking clock madness.

    The actual game sort of treats the ticking clock as your resolve to keep going, but that would make the final failure the moment your resolve fails and you simply give in. In reality, people often don’t want to go down without a fight, so everyone’s resolve flairs up at the end, just to be defeated anyway.

    Madness is a more accurate mechanic for ticking towards everything going wrong, because it’s expected to end dramatically. The extinguishing of candles feels more like a fuse in this situation, and when it all cumulates at the end of the game, that’s the foreshadowed tonal shift being met.

    Again my opinions are absolutely that of an amateur and god knows why I wrote so much about this.



  • I’m a 50/50 toss up between two reasonably different genres.

    The first is coming of age films, particularly queer ones. My go to film to call my favourite is Call me By Your Name, I also love Stand By Me, Aftersun and have a huge soft spot for Kiki’s delivery service.

    The other ‘genre’ is dramas / thrillers that get pretty fixated on madness, particularly from the protagonist. There will be Blood is my go to second film to say, and I love Apocalypse Now, Perfect Blue, The Witch and The lighthouse.

    I’m not as much fan of when the genres overlap however, although that may be because of how small the sample size is. There are quite a few films that have a young protagonist who is finding themselves, who may end up idolising another to the point that the film falls into being a thriller. We had Saltburn last year, which people often compare to The Talented Mr Ripley, and I do enjoy these films but I never get that milestone feeling that I’ve just experienced a piece of media that has profoundly impacted me. The only thing that exists in this shared space is one of my favourite novels; The Picture of Dorian Gray.




  • My friend works in their engineering department, he lost a ridiculous amount of his close colleagues today and my heart goes out to him.

    That said, I’m always blown away by the incredible R&D he’s up to, and the genuine passion for innovation and quality him and his team had. I genuinely think their quality good, even if they frame it as the apple of vaccums while actively pulling shit like this.




  • I was at the end of school during the 2016 election and my closest friend in my Comp-Sci class who I’d known from 11 was in the far right pipeline; this person found Hillary absolute abhorrent, loved trump and was generally the 2016 Pepe style crypto-facist. We live in the UK too, so this is even less common than it probably was in the USA.

    When school ended, I stopped speaking to this person, but a few years ago saw that she’s come out as a trans woman. I’m happy for her and not really keen to reconnect at all, but oh boy am I nosy about the timeline of her political views. I wonder if she still holds them, was struggling with internalised issues or just had a huge realisation at some point.



  • I’ve read quite a few anecdotes and quotes about Gygax’s misogyny before but I agree with you, I don’t think there is nearly enough information I these gods to extrapolate that it’ embodies all powerful masculine forces as good and all feminine as evil, especially as the article mentions how this perpetuates pre-existing coomo themes in story and myth. Everything we know about Gygax would say he’d lift from myths with sexist themes without adjusting that, rather than add them with intention.

    Do do think there is myriad evidence that Gygax believed femininity to be inherently inferior, but that’s different from evil. It’s still stupid and worth highlighting but by excessively demonising him to the point of nearly making things up, it’s just fuel for people to dismiss the valid points.