I wonder if “mAIcroslop” would get past the ban filter.

Have you heard of Derail Valley? Wonderful little game/simulator about driving trains around a multi-industry map. Instead of what most train simulators do, give you a pre-built train and route then tell you to drive the route perfectly, DV let’s you pick the locomotive and job, then lets you get it there however you want. Take the long way around? Blow through the Steel Mill at 120km/h? Lug eight other orders along with, dripping them off one by one? The game lets you do that.

If you make a big mistake, the game doesn’t stop simulating and say “you lost $X, try again”. You can derail a train so badly you send it straight into a lake. You can have the gasoline you’re hauling catch fire and explode. You can make a locomotive’s traction motors catch fire. You can break a gearbox or snap the hydraulic linkage. You can get a boiler explosion. The game keeps going. You have to figure out if/how you’re going to try salvaging the job order and if the locomotive is worth hauling back to get repaired.

It’s a wonderful game with tons of mods and quite a bit of customization- you can find these abandoned ‘museum trains’ and refurbish them, being able to customize them and put gadgets on them however you want. But since they’re yours, not the company’s, they can’t help you cover any damages to them.

It’s really fun! I think the train people here might get a kick out of it, even if they just look up a few videos.

For all the reading she does (or at least purports to do for Left on Read), I’m surprised November has as much neoliberal brain worms as she does. Add to that all the people she should be in contact with over her podcasts as well… I listen to all the WTYP episodes roughly when they come out, and she at least usually gets the cue to leave her geopolitical opinions in the news segment ever since Gareth joined on at least. She’s still pretty bad on TrashFuture, unfortunately.

Echoing SovietBeerTruckOperator, when did the whole Taiwan thing between her and Roz happen? I don’t entirely remember that one. I’ll try re-listening to a few more recent episodes and I’ll update this post if I find it.

A rod of Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive isotope. There’s a reason it says on the side “Drop & run”. Its radioactivity is the reason it’s messing up the photo- as the energetic radiation strikes the cells in the phone camera, it causes those cells to light up.

It’s part of this Analog Horror video by Gooseworx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo

It’s worth a watch if you can take analog horror.

My most recent game was a Hive Mind. I think I assimilated some 75% of the galaxy, getting right to the endgame crisis before the most recent update dropped. I’ve kind of lost interest in the save, partially because I played with Gigastructural Engineering and that updated with Machine Age as I was playing, so the save file is a little borked. Looking forward to playing with the Cosmic Storms and the upcoming Grand Archive, though.

I think I crushed two Fanatic Purifiers and assimilated the Great Khan, so you’re welcome, the rest of the galaxy.

There is somewhat of a case to be made for Materialist, considering Cosmogenesis and the Synaptic Lathe. But obviously not every materialist empire goes into that. To be a fanatic purifier, you need to be Fanatically Xenophobic and either Militarist or Spiritualist. I’d expect Xenophobic empires to not care (or care significantly less), but the other two ethics are a little more debatably nebulous as to how much they’d care.