>NONE of the details in this story are embellished, they are all simulated in-game
This is the crucial thing that distinguishes DF stories from LP writeups of other games. Other games provide maybe some suggestive details and you have to read between the lines. DF stories have to be pruned down from the huge amount of detail in the world.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead also gives this deep simulation experience in the form of an ascii survival game.
You’ll be hopped up on cocaine trying to offset the painkilling effects of the opioids, so you can maintain the necessary concentration to install a nightvision cybernetic enhancement directly into your eye, when a once domesticated hungry dog stops by and sees you as a regrettable alternative to starving. Knowing you won’t survive the encounter in your current state, you throw a grenade at it just to be on the safe side. Except, you didn’t throw it cause in your euphoria you decided to take a little micronap.
Or: you build a freaking TANK powered entirely by an array of solar panels. It doesn’t move very fast or far given its power source, so you just let it roll forward on its own while you read a book from before the cataclysm about How to Win Friends and Influence People (in case you ever actually meet anyone). While you’re reading, you accidentally crash at 5mph into a wall. You get out to repair the minor damage, and a zombie grabs you, and hundreds more are spilling out. If only you were in your tank...you bludgeon the zombie with your book and think about how to Win Friends and Influence People.
Stable releases are very old. 'Experimental' builds are very stable and most players update to newest build regularly. Some prefer to use a launcher for automatic updates: https://github.com/remyroy/CDDA-Game-Launcher/releases
Is it still under development? The OS X builds appear to get built daily, but the last blog post is over three years old, and so are the stable releases.
A Let's Play (commonly referred to as an LP) is a style of video (or a screenshot accompanied by text) series documenting the playthrough of a video game, usually including commentary by the gamer. A Let's Play differs from a video game walkthrough or strategy guide by focusing on an individual's subjective experience with the game, often with humorous, irreverent, or critical commentary from the gamer, rather than being an objective source of information on how to progress through the game.
It'd still be more cost-efficient to e.g. mine for gold under the ocean or in the Antarctic rather than send gear up to space to do that.
If we had a huge solid gold asteroid (how would that occur?) floating in a very close, very convenient orbit then maybe it would be cost-effective to send a ship to connect, re-orbit and land it without vaporizing; but anything realistic simply wouldn't be worth the launch effort&cost.
Not to mention that the idea of things just falling out of the sky when we need them sounds great to me.
Seriously, not kidding. Lets push 3D printing so hard all we need to do is send a few drones worth "up there", and oila .. free everything for everyone, forever.
It's less fun when you realize that being able to drop any meaningful amount of material from space is equivalent to having a weapon of mass destruction.
(This is actually a constant thing in spaceflight, that comes up because of the scales involved. Similarly to that, any engine able to cut down interplanetary travel to reasonable lengths (days, weeks) will have energy output of a WMD, and could be used as such.)
That's the door between train carriages, not in the station. I've never experienced an issue with the fake button but I'm going to pay attention to that sensor now!
A lot of effort and resources go into reproducing the sound of music recordings from, say, the 1960s -- even though the music producers in the 1960s would probably have loved to have had today's technology instead!
That was what I was trying to get across. This yearning and fetishization of "simpler" times and ways of doing things, as though there is something inherently noble and valuable about these practices, purely because they are historical.
And yet there won't quite ever be a Beatles or an Elvis again, will there?
It can be very hard to beat the zietgiest of an age at their own game. There is something special in that, which we try to measure up to, but still can't quite reproduce exactly even with better technology.
Will there ever be a eugene atget or a walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange that beat them at their own game?
Until you provide some criteria that would allow us to evaluate "beat them at their own game" for a particular body of photographs …
Eugene Atget or Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange were doing their thing in their now -- so beating them at their own game would be doing your thing in your now.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
In Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, set in the 2400's, most people work 20 hour weeks with the rest of their time spent on hobbies. A minority of people, whose jobs are their passions, work significantly more than 20 hours, this is termed Voking (as in, to be a vocateur) and is considered kinda unusual.
Reading between the lines, I think full automation is entirely possible in the setting but the world naturally settled on a 20 hour week to give everyone the benefits of purpose etc.
I'd also like to plug Iain M Banks' Culture series as an example of post-scarcity living. There is no shortage of ways to spend one's time or define one's identity without it being coupled to income generation.
That's be pretty cool. Or a step further with augmented reality; No need to print anything when you can just instantiate a persistent virtual "printout" and file them in virtual zero-g above your head, or anywhere in your own "slice" of the physical office
There's no such thing as US parmesan. Parmesan has PDO/DOP status and can only be made by wizened old men who've never travelled further than 12 miles from their picturesque place of birth in italy.
You can make "parmesan style hard cheese" but it's not the same. Grana padano is not parmesan, and that's PDO/DOP too
This is the crucial thing that distinguishes DF stories from LP writeups of other games. Other games provide maybe some suggestive details and you have to read between the lines. DF stories have to be pruned down from the huge amount of detail in the world.