Beef tea was when people would boil jerky to rehydrate it. I actually do that at work sometimes! Most nights I enjoy bouillon broth on its own, but occasionally I’ll spruce it up with a little jerky, and it actually thicken up and get more tender! It also GREATLY enhances the flavor of the broth. When the dry night air of the office is bothering my throat, nothing satisfies quite like warm broth.

(I get hot water by not putting any coffee grounds in the coffee machine. I also use this to prepare tea on occasion, and also ramen cups every once in a blue moon)

Huh. I never considered this before, but, the use of a shibboleth actually feels kinda related in a “two sides of the same coin” way to how dog whistles are used, aren’t they?

Like, both are means of individuals using memetics to subtly transmit their IFF disposition toward their chosen faction in an ideological conflict.

Except that the connotation of a dog whistle is that it also paints a target, drawing attention from their faction to designate a given subject, be it an entity or concept or object, as IFF-Hostile.

Oh come to think of it, actually…! IF used cynically and manipulatively, accusing someone of using a dog whistle could ITSELF hypothetically be a dog whistle, couldn’t it?

…

I feel the urge to clarify before I hit post that this is NOT an insinuation against you, though! I think you have a point, the person you’re calling out is legitimately being shady and evasive.

Especially after that shit they said in their reply about “it’s not my job to educate you” – that’s one of my biggest red flags for social media grifting:

When someone actually BELIEVES IN their rhetorical position, they’re usually excited to share its details with other people, not dismissive and terse, because social media is an arena where the one person we’re responding to is FAR from the only person who can be moved by our voice. Passionately elucidating one’s points may not move one’s interlocutors, but it CAN sway multitudes of observers who can become motivated to speak up.

Feels kinda poetically similar to how our neurons arrive at the consensus of a decision in our brains and how bee colonies decide which flower patches to visit and such!

Oh noooo don’t tell the shitlibs or they’ll start calling it no binarix XD

Ha good fucking luck charging an early cancellation fee to the VIRTUAL CARD I GENERATED AND DESTROYED THE MOMENT I DECIDED TO STOP PUTTING UP WITH YOUR SHITTY “SERVICE”! FUCK you, Adobe. You get NOTHING from me.

They’re sure giving EA a run for their money universally despised revulsion…

MapMen. I still rewatch some of their ad skits just because they were catchy and fun.

Yeah grab yourself a couple buckets full and just blot out the rest with several stacks of gravel :D

Oh wow I wasn’t even referring to villager agency but I kinda agree with you - ESPECIALLY on the grounds of what you described in terms of pathing for them, what I feel I’d call “parbaked pathing”.

My idea with using pathfinding algorithms as the root of village generation was to prevent ridiculously awful disasters of architecture in the first place by ensuring that villages would only tend to generate where a village would hypothetically have all the things it needs:

a. Open, stable, solid, reasonably flat-ish ground

b. Hypothetical easy connectivity to (imaginary speculative) “resources” in the world (that are in actuality arbitrary points of interest that tried to pathfind to each other and whose paths inevitably converged at a.)

c. Potential access to other villages for travel.

If villagers DID have agency to actively build instead of magically-already-have-been-built-now-they’re-stuck-with-a-lava-pool-burning-all-the-wooden-houses, what would be cool about that PLUS never developing a village on top of a lava pool would be the potential for villagers to build actual roads between villages when the POI-linking pathfinding in the background happens to touch two villages concurrently…
(like lightning, shooting out tracers to establish a current but then committing once a viable route is found)

This should not be something happening in the foreground though so as not to harm chunk loading performance. Maybe only actionable when a player trades with villagers and somehow tells them “yeah, I’d like you to proceed with that”.

We already have sculk that spreads - and arbitrarily, chaotically so! - in response to player interaction, after all. This proposal would violate precedent LESS than that.

See, killing puppies is only okay if you’re a republican like Kristi Noem.

^/s

… i dunno OP, the guy who wrote that letter had a point: the sugar-coating of awful things HAS blown up in our faces, and there really IS a pernicious romanticized fever dream of fascism being tolerable right now. We need to confront the shit happening and teach the youth that the shit is, in fact, shitty.

Well, I’d like to point out that this isn’t manipulating the terrain so much as taking the terrain as it is and predicating the generation of villages on the extant properties of the terrain. And while the POI generation system in minecraft does not guarantee something is always there, it would be fine if the ‘attempt’ to generate a POI there was enough for a corresponding ‘attempt’ to pathfind to it. Dead end paths manifest in real life too sometimes.

Also, it’s perfectly feasible to limit recursion in tiers, somewhat the way that the Distant Horizons mod does: It performs a limited query of minecraft’s terrain generation code that only roughs out surface-level details speculatively. They are not fully realized. Precalculating speculative paths between potential POI-sites in the far distance as a background operation before you get close enough to generate those chunks “for real” would be a function of what process cycles you have to spare rather than being a prerequisite before rendering the next frame.

“why should we develop the game when instead we can simply ‘encourage’ the players to develop it for us?”

in minecraft, ‘factional regions’ could be defined by drawing voronoi diagrams whose seeds/sites/generators are the woodland mansions… implying that the ruling classes of the villagers are the illagers and that their standing army of enforcers are the pillagers at the outposts…! With just the barest hint of structure, an entire narrative can emerge almost effortlessly. If the world were filled with stone walls delimiting these regions, suddenly there is a sense of political tension and territoriality. Just as roads convey a “sense” of connection, walls can convey a sense of conflict. With these in place, the world would feel much more lively and interlinked!

If you felt so inclined, this village was in Seed -592881470 at x+784 z+80

i mean … as i type this i feel a little silly thinking someone would spin up a copy of this world just to go to that specific village and graciously unfuck its shit, but … i can’t help but put myself in your position given what you’ve said and feel the urge to represent at least one version of their universe where their town isn’t a total disaster 😅

All it did was update the professions, make some layout variants that remained entirely blind to terrain circumstances, and eventually add the pillager outposts (village and pillage) but…

Heck, if you think about it, we have three strata of a society right in front of us, and it’s even anarchism-coded!

• Peasants living their happy little egalitarian lives in villages,

• Hostile constabulary tromping through with their jack boots wielding the state’s monopoly on violence to exploit the villagers’ labor (Pillagers from outposts)

• Nobility debaucherously luxuriating at their isolated estates detached from all the worldly drudgery (Illagers in Woodland Mansions).

Connecting them with roads and implying that pillagers only raid because they consider Steves and Alexes to be dangerous foreign outlaws would even make sense. Of course they would want to punish the village that was collaborating with that “dangerous outsider” who killed one of their lieutenants!

I for one think that pillagers and illagers should be hostile toward spiders, zombies, and skeletons, but that once roadways are generated in a world they should be patrolling them.

Adding nuance to this such that maybe pillagers might only retain the name for the sake of the pun and would otherwise be dangerous but ‘neutral’… would suit the world terribly well.

oh but I thought “HaMaS dOeSn’T wAnT pEaCe”

…

they both “incited insurrection” o_o;

huh.

except trump did it literally and jesus did it metaphorically.

it has in fact been a delightful creative aid for brainstorming fiction, actually!

The things are fantastic at “yes-and” improvisation and extrapolating from a premise.

If I want to build a world and populate it with loosely defined ‘impressionistic’ background info that doesn’t necessarily require fully fledged lore that interconnects, it can do a great job at showing where the lore could go if i decided to explore there. It’s great at suggesting character names, place names, and ways to fill in blanks that make it easier for me to pick or reject individual elements.

In a story idea I’ve been marinating for a while, one character possesses advanced medical knowledge in a world where germ theory, medicine, and surgery never developed because people had access to ‘healing magic’. The problem is, healing magic works on all organisms - including parasites, bacteria, and cancer, which means trying to ‘heal’ someone with an infection makes the infection worse because the pathogens benefited from the healing magic.

I asked AI to extrapolate more detail about this character’s background and it suggested that his father was the village healer and simply didn’t mention his mother at all.

Those two little details exploded in my imagination as an entire history of emotional conflict:
His mother fell ill with a bacterial infection that magic couldn’t fix when he was too little to do anything about it even though he knew what was wrong and how to help her, and so he blamed himself.
His ‘strange ideas’ about physiology, epidemiology, and concepts like hygiene and medicine put him at odds with the traditional teachings his father, and made the other people in his village view him as a ‘problem child’.
This led him to be quiet and withdrawn until he befriends the protagonist, and it is her falling ill when the same disease that killed his mother that motivates him to try again with the rudimentary resources he was able to secretly scrape together since.

(this is an ‘isekai inversion’ where all the reincarnators are disillusioned and discouraged, and the protagonist is a native of that world who travels around finding them, putting them in touch with one another, and motivating them to pursue their specializations again. A nuclear engineer, for instance, won’t be able to get much done in a world where the scientific method hasn’t been codified, manufacturing doesn’t exist let alone precision machining, and chemistry has not clawed its way to distinction out of the vague, secretive, formless depths of alchemy)

…complex almost entirely wholly-hallucinated answers that only have as much bearing on reality as ‘some dude who is very talkative and heard about a bunch of stuff second-hand, and who is also high as balls and experiencing a manic episode where they think they know everything’

Then his wife dies and his dog breaks down.