Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
please stop using brave browser.
Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025)
boosted
@henry I keep this cartoon on my desktop, for those times when my brain is beating me up for stumbling. Some days are hard...sheesh, some months are hard, and sometimes our brain isn't as helpful giving us a hand up when we trip as we might like.
But, we get back up. That's the important bit. We get back up. 
tangent, re: workers and resources
Tangentially, by this point I should probably just buy the entire back catalog of what Hooded Horse has published, because lately every time I'm like "huh this is a surprisingly different and neat game" they seem to be the publisher, and they definitely seem to be doing something right
workers and resources, game design (4)
(Also, I quite like that you can just turn off the 'police and crime' aspect. It's doing slightly better than most games at modelling it as a preventable issue with causes rather than some fact of life, but I still don't like the implementation well enough, and here I can just choose to disable it entirely. Like you can do with surprisingly many of the mechanics.)
workers and resources, game design (3)
Anyway, this still isn't the anarchist city builder that I would like to see (which, admittedly, I wasn't expecting it to be to begin with), but I'm finding it much easier to play this game the way I would want to play a city builder, than just about every other city builder I've tried. And I've been looking for a decade by this point.
Also goddamn, the road/track building system is *lightyears* ahead of that in Cities Skylines. Take note, Colossal Order, this is how you do this.
workers and resources, game design (2)
To expand on the 'policy freedom' a bit: you absolutely *can* play this game in an authoritarian way, it definitely has the mechanics in place. But you can also just... not do that, and still have a perfectly viable city, unlike most capitalist city builders where if you don't buy into the "expand wealth at any cost" gameplay loop, that's basically a guaranteed path to defeat.
The genre of city builders, colony builders, etc. is pretty universally problematic in that they're essentially always built around 'god game mechanics' where you are in some way the ultimate arbiter of whatever happens in the world, regardlesss of the political window dressing that it gets, so it's refreshing to see a city builder game that at least somewhat diverts from this path, and where you sometimes genuinely feel like "I will just have to deal with this, this isn't really under my control", with your task more being that of a caretaker than of a ruler.
There are more games that do this, but they're usually not 'modern' city builders.
workers and resources, game design
Recently been fascinated by Workers and Resources for two very different reasons:
1. It breaks *so many* assumptions about how city builders 'should' work, and does so incredibly well.
2. I had avoided it for a long time, expected it to be designed as a very authoritarian game, but to my surprise it turns out to be much less authoritarian in structure than most capitalism-oriented city builders, and gives you a lot more 'policy freedom' (despite what the theme implies).
It's not *quite* where I would want the genre to be (for both gameplay and political reasons) but goddamn does it get surprisingly close.
@serapath (I mentioned "anti-capitalist" as a requirement in my original post and Holepunch is literally the reason that I did)
@serapath I'm not really interested in arguing this. I was following Dat (and then Hypercore) long before Holepunch got involved, and it absolutely got co-opted. What the structure is on paper doesn't really matter.
Tired: learning how neurotypicals communicate so you can live in their society.
Wired: learning how neurotypicals communicate so you can make them feel *really* uncomfortable when they're being shitty.
@pinoaffe Ik denk niet dat dat het helemaal verklaart. Het zou bijvoorbeeld allemaal een stuk begrijpelijker zijn als men consistent de variabelen zou definieren, i.p.v. te verwachten dat je die infereert uit de formule. Dan zou dat 'standaard notatie gebruiken' al veel minder een probleem zijn, maar *ook dat* gebeurt niet...
@eater Voor de duidelijkheid, het gaat dus ook niet om een gedeeld pand ofzo. Het is gewoon letterlijk hetzelfde bedrijf. Johnny's is de licentiehouder van het O'Tacos-merk voor NL, en Chick'N Crisp lijken ze zelf bedacht te hebben.
@eater Johnny's heeft nu twee 'ghost kitchen'-merken (zij noemen het zelf 'virtual kitchen' maar dat is gewoon hetzelfde), een ervan is O'Tacos en de andere is Chick'N Crisp maar dat is allebei dus gewoon Johnny's, en daar kan ik erg slecht tegen.
Het hele idee achter die virtual/ghost kitchens is om je menukaart op te delen in meerder merken zodat je feitelijk aan concurrentievervalsing kunt doen en een monopolie op alles kunt krijgen, want een hoop mensen denken dan dat ze een keus hebben terwijl het uiteindelijk allemaal gewoon in dezelfde keuken van hetzelfde bedrijf door dezelfde mensen gemaakt en verkocht wordt. De volgende stap daarin is dan een vergelijkbaar assortiment bij meerdere merken.
Totaal onnodig, en gewoon een concurrentievervalsend marketingtruukje dat niemand iets oplevert behalve henzelf.
@serapath Holepunch is a sketchy company and absolutely not anti-capitalist (and did some very shitty things to Dat)
@eater (Bezorgrestaurants heb ik niet zo'n moeite mee, maar wel met ghost kitchens die weet-ik-hoe-veel merken gaan runnen alsof het onafhankelijke bedrijven zijn terwijl het allemaal eigenlijk van 1 partij is en het net zo goed 1 menukaart had kunnen zijn)
@eater Huh, echt? Ik wist dat ze tegenwoordig een hoop bezorg/afhaalfilialen hadden, maar niet dat het echt volledig ghost kitchens geworden zijn.
Nee he... de ghost kitchens zijn nu blijkbaar in Nederland ook in opmars. Uitgebaat door Johnny's Burger Co in ieder geval.
"Considering more general distribution models is a good direction for future work"
Ah yes, the "we couldn't be bothered with this" comment in academese
@jdp23 (Basically, blockchains kind of wrecked this entire research space, and I'm hoping that there's some work somewhere that I missed)
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
