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[POLITICS] Social Deduction Games and the Erosion of Political Trust

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A Rift of Wants I’ll admit, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had time and inclination to sit down, pull up the old blogging software, and really set in on breaking down ideas and sharing some insights that I’ve had. After all, my personal experience is built out of a weird space. I’m an ex-software engineer. I’ve spent most of my life studying games, of one sort or another, with a focus on tabletop. I’ve written a couple of books on gaming, have an extensive library of tabletop role-playing games, wargames, and story games. I’ve been a games journalist, actually getting paid to write about what I think regarding games. When you get right to it, you can think of me as an escapee from House Tytalus into the real world – and that parallel alone says entirely too much about me. But that doesn’t preclude me from being a political animal. Whether I want to or not. In particular, over the last two years all of us have become intimately familiar with the efforts of government...
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[GAMING] SUPERHOT is 5 Years Old

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SUPERHOT is 5 years old SUPERHOT is five years old. And I've been playing it since the beginning. In case you've never heard of the most innovative shooter I've played in years. No, not just because I have been programmed to say that – it literally is the most innovative shooter I've played in years. The core idea of "time only moves when you do" is pure electric gold. It turns what is a frenetic experience into something more akin to a complex turn-based experience, one in which you have ample opportunity to consider how badly you just screwed up as you watch a bullet that you don't have the means to intercept hurtle right to your head – and beyond. When you're successful, when it's over, when the deadly dance of death has played itself out and you stand atop a pile of exploded red guy corpses, you get the chance to watch your magnificent ballet in what would be real-time. You catch that fleeting moment where you sliced a bullet in half or r...
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Location: Lawrenceville, GA 30046, USA
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[LOCAL NEWS] The Model Confederacy

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The Model Confederacy So my local government has done it; they have decided one of the most important periods in American history, one that the Social Justice Warriors lean on as one of the prime motivators and excuses for ever-increasing authoritarianism in the pursuit of justice, never happened. The American Civil War is no more. Never happened. And with it, obviously there must have never been an issue with slavery in the United States – or else we would've fought a war over it. And after that war, there certainly weren't any acts of reconciliation, magnanimous allowances to the defeated in order to allow them some measure of dignity in the course of a return to actual unity. LAWRENCEVILLE, GA — The Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners has approved a resolution to move a controversial Confederate monument into storage while court proceedings revolving around the 28-year-old monument continue. The monument sits on the grounds of Gwinnett County's Historic Cour...
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Location: Lawrenceville, GA 30046, USA
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[Technical] Designing an Access Control Application for Convention Event Management

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In order to implement a crowd management system which is capable of capping the number of attendees in a given area, provides for security in making sure that the system can't be subverted by a bad actor from outside, and which is fast and easy to train new users on, you can use the commonly available cell phone, a custom web app, and cheaply printed custom tear-off tickets with sequential UPC to build a scalable, robust implementation. Requirements Controlling entry into a public space, a number of things have to be present in order to be possible. Note that this discussion doesn't discuss controlling or tracking exits from an event space. An area with clear bottlenecks, of at most two-person wide entries Staff interested in and empowered to control entry at the bottlenecks A means of controlling and tracking individual entries to the space A cell phone or tablet with camera for each controlling staffer Staff within the space interested in , trained, and empowered to contr...
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Location: Lawrenceville, GA 30046, USA
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[5150] Gaea's Worst: HELL'S BREATHER (Pt IV)

EXT. THE ORPHIC ORACLE - DAY Everything proceeds in silence. The Oracle is not the largest ship in any fleet. In fact, she's downright tiny compared to the bulk of the refueller that she's nuzzled up against, her sphincters dilated for easy access to her holds. Hydrogen and helium get pumped into bulging tanks above and rear. Men and women, like ants on a watermelon, clamber over her hull checking for micrometeorite damage or worse. The hull has definitely seen worse. The rear is open, pressed against a large umbilicus, sealed tight against vacuum. Inside the translucent extension, shadows shift, casting pantomime shadows against the near wall. INT. ORACLE LOADING BAY - CONTINUOUS Abruptly, it's a hammer of noise as machines clank, motors strain, and people shout across the clamour. HENRI LLOYD stands in a commanding position over the bay on a stack of supply crates, hands on hips, face a mask of conflicting emotions. He wears a bandage on his left sh...
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Location: Lawrenceville, GA 30046, USA
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