922 lines
44 KiB
Plaintext
922 lines
44 KiB
Plaintext
% !TEX TS-program = xelatex
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\setkomafont{title}{\bfseries\Huge}
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\setkomafont{author}{\large}
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\title{Circumlunar Transmissions}
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\subtitle{Issue One}
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\author{sloum \and joneworlds \and tfurrows \and solderpunk \and durtal \and wholesomedonut}
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\date{May 2021}
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\publishers{\textsc{Shell-to-Shelf}}
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\uppertitleback{Circumlunar Transmissions\\*
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Issue One\\*
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May 2021\\
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Edited by mieum\\*
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Produced by the sundogs of circumlunar.space\\
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Typeset using {\KOMAScript} and {\LaTeX}\\
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Visit us on the \textsc{Smolnet:}\\
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\textsc{Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu}\\*
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\texttt{gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space\\*
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gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space}\\
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\textsc{Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic}\\*
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\texttt{gopher://republic.circumlunar.space\\*
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gemini://republic.circumlunar.space}\\
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\textsc{Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency}\\*
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\texttt{gopher://soviet.circumlunar.space\\*
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gemini://soviet.circumlunar.space}\\
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}
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\lowertitleback{\textsc{Shell-to-Shelf\\*
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CC BY 4.0}}
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\titleformat{\chapter}[display]
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\titleformat{\section}[hang]
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{\normalfont\bfseries\raggedright}{}{0pt}{\large}
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\titleformat{\subsection}[hang]
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{\normalfont\bfseries\raggedright}{}{0pt}{\large}
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\begin{document}
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\frontmatter
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\maketitle
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\tableofcontents
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\chapter{Preface}
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\begin{multicols}{3}
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\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{B}{ack in February},
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around the time of the ogre incident, Jone wondered out loud on the
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circumlunar.space BBS, telem, about the possibility of a CS zine. The idea was
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well-received by the rest of us sundogs, and for some time, talk of the zine
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flooded telem as we proceeded to howl at the moon in excitement. Amidst this
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jubilee, I somehow ended up wearing the proverbial editor pants--for this
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inaugural issue, at least.
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Anyone who has had the pleasure of perusing the many phlogs and gemlogs here at
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circumlunar.space will be aware of the impressive diversity of interests,
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talents, and backgrounds of the sundogs residing here. It will be interesting
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to see how these influence the zine over time, but currently what the zine is
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and how it will be produced is largely still up in the air. It's really just a
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fun experiment, and this first issue is a kind of pilot episode.
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The strategy of this first run has been to just get it out there. Rather than
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prematurely exhausting our energy on determining what it should be, or
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pidgeonholing ourselves into a niche or format without actually having produced
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any content, we elected to first just give it a go and see what we get. So for
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this first issue, we have what has been endearingly termed a ``topic salad.''
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And I believe it has turned out to be quite a nutritious one at that.
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Circumlunar Transmissions will be distributed exclusively over Gopher and
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Gemini by whoever would like to host a copy on their own gopherhole or capsule.
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That is, anyone can clone the git repo of the project and serve its contents
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from their own smolnet space. This kind of ``newstand'' method of distribution
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solves a lot of the logistical issues of where and how to bi-host such a thing
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in an accessible way. In addition to Gopher and Gemini editions, we intend to
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provide printable formats that readers can easily print-and-bind for their own
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enjoyment offline or to distribute locally.
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It has been a pleasure to contribute something to this wonderful community of
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thoughtful and creative individuals whom I respect and admire sincerely. During
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my relatively brief inhabitation of the Zaibatsu, I've learnt a great many
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things and have been inspired to create and wonder about things I would not
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have otherwise. It is with profound gratitude and pride for this habitat and
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its inhabitants, and the smolnet ecosystem at large, that I present to you this
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first issue of our smolzine, \emph{Circumlunar Transmissions}.
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\begin{flushright}
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mieum\\*
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\textsc{April 25, 2021\\*
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Incheon, Korea}
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\end{flushright}
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\end{multicols}
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\mainmatter
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\chapter{The Circumlunar Mixtape}
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\begin{center}
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\begin{BVerbatim}
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.------------------------.
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| CT001 |
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| __ ______ __ |
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| /. \|\.....|/ \ |
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| \__/|/_____|\__/ |
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| sloum |
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| ________________ |
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|___/_._o________o_._\___|
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\end{BVerbatim}
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\end{center}
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\begin{multicols}{2}
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\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{T}{he} Circumlunar Mixtape is an ongoing series for Circumlunar
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Transmissions where one user per issue shares 10 tracks they have been
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listening to. Y'all have all kinds of ways to stream or otherwise find
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and listen to music, so tracks are just listed and it is on the reader
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to locate them. As a courtesy, when a weblink to streaming is available
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playlist curators may choose to supply it.
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\section{sloum's covid-year
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playlist}
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These are songs I have listened to at various points throughout the last
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year. Some are old some are new. It has been a weird year and this is a
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kind of weird mix. I provided Bandcamp weblinks for each track except
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the Charlie Parr, which is a Youtube link because I like this song live
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and this is my favorite performance recording of it and the recording
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doesn't appear on any of his albums.
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\noindent{Enjoy!} \\
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\end{multicols}
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{0}} & \textbf{Forward Beckons Rebound} \\
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& by Adrianne Lenker\\
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& from \emph{Songs} \\
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& \small{https://adriannelenker.bandcamp.com/track/forwards-beckon-rebound} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{1}} & \textbf{Catamaran} \\
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& by talons' \\
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& from \emph{Songs for Boats} \\
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& \small{https://talons.bandcamp.com/track/catamaran} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{2}} & \textbf{Possessed by the Devil} \\
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& by Charlie Parr \\
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& (Live) \\
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& \small{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46hGYUycoE} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{3}} & \textbf{Some Voices} \\
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& by Pinback \\
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& from \emph{Some Voices} \\
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& \small{https://pinback.bandcamp.com/track/some-voices} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{4}} & \textbf{Get to Know You} \\
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& by Tomo Nakayama \\
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& from \emph{Melonday} \\
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& \small{https://tomomusic.bandcamp.com/track/get-to-know-you} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{5}} & \textbf{Just a Cloud} \\
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& by Lusine \\
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& from \emph{Sensorimotor} \\
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& \small{https://lusine.bandcamp.com/track/just-a-cloud-feat-vilja-larjosto} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{6}} & \textbf{Good Morning Captain} \\
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& by Slint \\
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& from \emph{Spiderland (Remastered)} \\
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& \small{https://slint.bandcamp.com/track/good-morning-captain-remastered} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{7}} & \textbf{Step Into You} \\
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& by Hum \\
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& from \emph{Inlet} \\
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& \small{https://humband.bandcamp.com/track/step-into-you} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{8}} & \textbf{Kingfisher} \\
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& by Windhand \\
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& from \emph{Grief's Infernal Flower} \\
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& \small{https://windhand.bandcamp.com/track/kingfisher} \\
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\multicolumn{2}{c}{} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\begin{tabular}{c l}
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\multirow{4}{*}{\Huge{9}} & \textbf{Nue} \\
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& by Nils Frahm \\
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& from \emph{Wintermusik} \\
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& \small{https://nilsfrahm.bandcamp.com/track/nue} \\
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\end{tabular} \\
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\chapter{Ask Jone}
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\begin{center}
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W. asks:\\[8pt]
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\texttt{\small{I have a strained relationship with my sister.\\*
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What are some things I can do to help repair it?}}
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\end{center}
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\begin{multicols}{3}
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\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{I}{ remember} my dad and I went through this patch where we were both
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pretty pissed off at each other, not that I remember why at this point.
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But sharing is caring, right? So to keep things going, I'm still
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dropping off cans of Chunk'n'Dunk soup for him, because it's all he ever
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feels like eating anymore. Although that stuff is just not very
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nutritious. But because I'm mad at him, I don't bother to bring his
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favorite, the meatball-carrot stew one. Instead, I bring him can after
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can of turkey-a-la-king. You ever try that one from Chunk'n'Dunk? Not
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great. And I guess dad's thinking along the same lines as me, because
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every time I come by he leaves me another pair of snow tires he found.
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But I'm not selling tires any more by then, so I don't want them. And he
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knows that, but he keeps on getting tires anyhow.
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And so we go on like this for weeks: I come by and put like 5 more cans
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of turkey-a-la-king on his kitchen counter, and he stacks a few more
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snow tires outside his door for me. And all this stuff is piling higher
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and higher and higher, and we're gradually getting madder and madder at
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each other. Until one day I go over there with another box of cans, and
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he starts screaming and yelling about how he hates turkey-a-la-king. And
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he gets so mad he accidentally knocks over the stack of cans. And some
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falls on his head and he falls over, and the rest of the cans come
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crashing down on him. Pretty bad scene. So I go to help him up, but I
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slip and trip on a can on the floor, and hit the ground hard too. And if
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you've ever fallen on a pile of Chunk'n'Dunk turkey-a-la-king cans, you
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know that hurts pretty bad.
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So we're both groaning on the ground, and then there's this weird sound
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by the front door. When I get out there to check it I find that
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co-incidentally the big pile of snow tires out there has also fallen
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over, and it's crushed some unlucky little gnome who must have been
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milling around by there. Those things are so bad at staying alive, I
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just can't believe it sometimes.
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Anyways, if you're looking to patch things up with your sister, I would
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say maybe don't do it with canned soup, or snow tires. It sure didn't
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help us any. It just wasn't a good result for anyone, especially for
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that gnome. Or if you have to go with soup, at least stick with the
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meatball-carrot one. It's actually not bad.
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\noindent{Thanks for writing in. I hope that helps.}
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\end{multicols}
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\begin{center}
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\emph{Do you have a problem?\\*
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Send your questions to:} \\[8pt]
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\begin{BVerbatim}
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________________________
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|\ /|
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| \ joneworlds / |
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| \ @ / |
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| \ mailbox.org / |
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| \______________/ |
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| / \ |
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| / \ |
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|____/_____________\_____|
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\end{BVerbatim}
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\end{center}
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\chapter{Manifesto of a Granular Ideologue}
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by tfurrows
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\begin{multicols}{2}
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\section{Passing Thoughts of an Impractical
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Idealist}
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\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{O}{ur} ancestors stood on the banks of the Euphrates and cast their ideas
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into the inexhaustible current. First they cast in words, ephemeral.
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Then they learned permanence; epochs brought clay tablets and papyrus,
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script and type, bits and clouds.\\
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Permanence dammed the river, a logjam of ideas tossed in as if each was
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a consummate standard. Life-giving waters slowed, intelligence waned,
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the elastic mind seized and crumbled. The word manifesto dates to the
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fourteenth century, but the notion dates to our earliest written
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conclusions.\\
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This is not the manifesto to end all manifestos. It is a message in a
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bottle that few will find. It is a loose model for dealing with the
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mountainous dam of manifestos that stop the flow of creativity, passion,
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and progress. At the risk of making the problem worse, I proffer:
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\subsection[From a Message in a Bottle]{From a Message in a Bottle, Sitting Atop the Dam of Manifestos}
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\begin{description}
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\item [Let] your mind move freely, become a seeker
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\item [Accept] that knowledge is scattered broadly
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\item [Find] kernels of truth and germinate thoughts
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\end{description}
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\begin{center}
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\rule{1cm}{0.5pt}
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\end{center}
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\begin{description}
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\item [Take] something from every ideology, fear nothing
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\item [Subscribe] to that which you find value in
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\item [Mistrust] labels, they carry unimaginable baggage
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\end{description}
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\begin{center}
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\rule{1cm}{0.5pt}
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\end{center}
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\begin{description}
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\item [Acknowledge] all that came before, but accept the utility of your journey
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\item [Never] believe that you have the best vision for the world
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\item [Don't] try to fashion the world to your ideals; your ideals are cursory
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\end{description}
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\begin{center}
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\rule{1cm}{0.5pt}
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\end{center}
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\begin{description}
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\item [Be] a maximal minimalist, distill purity from immensity
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\item [Find,] purify, share, repeat
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\item [To] conclude means to cease to grow\\[10pt]
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\end{description}
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\end{multicols}
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\begin{center}
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\texttt{tfurrows@circumlunar.space}\\*
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\texttt{tfurrows@sdf.org}
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\end{center}
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\chapter[What's the Deal with Leap Seconds]{What's the Deal with Leap Seconds? A Brief Overview of Timescales}
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\chaptermark{What's the Deal with Leap Seconds}
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by solderpunk
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\begin{multicols}{3}
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\section{Astronomical Seconds}
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\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{W}{hy} is a second as long as it is, and not a little shorter or a little
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longer? This is a seemingly simple question which leads down a deep and
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delightfully twisted rabbit hole. It's something that I wish Neal
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Stephenson had written an epically long, inexplicably compelling 1990s
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Wired article about, in the spirit of his ``Mother Earth, Mother Board''
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or ``In the Kingdom of Mao Bell''. But he didn't, so you're stuck
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reading this, instead: a brief, incomplete, possibly slightly inaccurate
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overview based on my own characteristically obsessive reading on the
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topic over the past week or so.
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For most of the time that the concept of the second has been around, its
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length has been defined implicitly by that of the day. Everybody knows
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the answer to ``why is a day as long as it is?'' - one day is the time
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it takes the Earth to complete a single revolution about its axis. And
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since there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24
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hours in a day, a second is simply one 86,400th of the time it takes the
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Earth to rotate once. Or, if you like, a second is the time it takes for
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the Earth to rotate one 240th of a degree, out of the full 360. End of
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story, right?
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Well, no. This is a perfectly sensible way to define time - for some
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applications, it's the best way to do it. This astronomically defined
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time scale is still in use today in certain contexts. The official name
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of its modern incarnation is Universal Time, or UT (technically, there
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are a few subtly different variants, denoted UT0, UT1 and UT2, but we'll
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gloss over that here). The official determination of UT nowadays is
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based mostly on measurements made at observatories tracking the movement
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of distant radio sources across the sky as the Earth rotates. This is
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easier than making precision measurements of the sun, but is still
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measuring the exact same thing.
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\section[Earth is not the Best Clock]{Earth is a Nice Place to Live, but it's not the Best
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Clock}
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The problem with an astronomical definition of the second is this: the
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Earth doesn't actually rotate at a perfectly constant rate (it wasn't
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until the 19th century that we could build clocks accurate enough to
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notice this). In fact, the Earth's rotation is slowing down. Very
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slowly, of course. Every century, a complete rotation takes about 2
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milliseconds longer than it used to. The rate of slowing down is not
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steady. Some years the change is more and other years it's less. In
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fact, even though the overall trend is one of slowing down, some years
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the rotation actually speeds up. The dynamics of the process are
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complicated, and we can't make accurate long term forecasts.
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Gravitational interaction between the Earth and the moon is the primary
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driver, but the movement of tectonic plates and friction between Earth's
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surface and its atmosphere and oceans have their say, too. The Indian
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Ocean Earthquake in 2004 was powerful enough to shorten the length of a
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day by 2.68 microseconds. There are even periodic variations in the rate
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of rotation that we just don't understand the cause of yet. But the take
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home message is that, whatever the causes, astronomical seconds actually
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have small, random fluctuations in their duration over long time spans.
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If you define the second by looking into the skies, no two seconds are
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exactly the same.
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That's a pretty inconvenient property for the official definition of a
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fundamentally important unit like the second to have. For most of the
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time this definition was used, the fluctuations were smaller than we
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could reliably measure. Certainly, they weren't enough to have an impact
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on everyday life. Nobody was going to be late to lunch because of the
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Earth's unsteady rotation. But by the 20th century, scientific and
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technological progress meant these tiny fluctuations started to matter,
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as we began measuring natural phenomena and building machines which
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operated on very small time scales. A 10 megahertz radio oscillator, for
|
|
example, has a period of 0.0000001 seconds - only 100 nanoseconds!
|
|
Gigahertz radiation, which is important in radio astronomy and was used
|
|
for communications and radar during WWII decades before it came to
|
|
underpin modern technology like GPS, WiFi, and mobile data networks, has
|
|
periods measured in \emph{picoseconds}. Even very, very small variations
|
|
in the length of a second are enough to make the measured frequency of
|
|
radio waves change, even if the \emph{actual} frequency is fixed. Modern
|
|
technological society simply couldn't be built using a wobbly clock like
|
|
the Earth.
|
|
|
|
\section{Atomic Seconds}
|
|
|
|
Fortunately, in the 1950s, atomic clocks were invented which kept time
|
|
better than any previous mechanism. I'll gloss right over the details,
|
|
but suffice it to say, we came up with a new way to define the second
|
|
which involved measuring the properties of caesium atoms instead of
|
|
looking at things moving through the sky. In 1967, the relatively young
|
|
International System (or SI, for the French ``Système International'')
|
|
of units redefined the second on this basis. The new atomic second was
|
|
defined such that it had the same length as the astronomical second in
|
|
use before it, as far as measurements at the time could tell, but it had
|
|
the added bonus that the length of the second was then fixed and
|
|
unchanging. Caesium atoms at a given temperature ``vibrate'' (very
|
|
loosely speaking) at a frequency which, as far as we can tell, is
|
|
completely and perfectly stable, and which can be measured very
|
|
accurately in a sufficiently advanced laboratory.
|
|
|
|
With the arrival of atomic seconds, a new time scale was also defined:
|
|
International Atomic Time (or TAI, for the French ``Temps Atomique
|
|
International''). At midnight on January 1st in 1958, TAI and UT were
|
|
perfectly synchronised. Ever since then, they have slowly but surely
|
|
drifted apart. The seconds of TAI are of perfectly unchanging length (as
|
|
measured by averaging hundreds of atomic clocks all over the world), but
|
|
the seconds of UT fluctuate with the Earth's rotation. The accumulated
|
|
drift up until now is a little less than 40 seconds, but it will
|
|
continue to grow, without limit. And while the perfectly uniform seconds
|
|
of TAI make it the perfect tool for some tasks, this drift apart from UT
|
|
makes it problematic for others. If you go outside at noon UT in
|
|
Greenwich, England (or anywhere else at 0 degrees longitude), the sun
|
|
will \emph{always} be high in the sky. This is true today and it will be
|
|
true in a thousand years, Because UT is fundamentally linked to the
|
|
Earth's rotation. TAI, on the other hand, is fundamentally divorced from
|
|
it. Thousands of years in the future, there will come a day when,
|
|
according to TAI, the sun rises in Greenwich at midnight.
|
|
|
|
This isn't just an abstract concern for the distant future. In the late
|
|
'50s when TAI was defined, it was still common for ships at sea to
|
|
figure out where they were by using a sextant to record the position of
|
|
the sun above the horizon at a certain time and consulting a printed
|
|
table of conversions. For this purpose, ships carried the most accurate
|
|
clocks they could afford, and compared them regularly against true UT
|
|
time using time signals broadcast by radio stations all over the world.
|
|
Celestial navigation works very well when using a timescale which is
|
|
tightly linked to Earth's rotation, and hence the position of things in
|
|
the sky. But if the radio time signals switched to broadcasting TAI
|
|
instead of UT, celestial navigation would become increasingly less
|
|
accurate as TAI drifted further out of synch with the Earth and the
|
|
stars. This meant that the ``new and improved'' TAI time scale wasn't
|
|
actually an improvement for everybody.
|
|
|
|
\section{Coordinating Chaos}
|
|
|
|
Instead of broadcasting two different time signals for different
|
|
purposes, which could easily lead to confusion, on January 1st in 1960
|
|
the powers that be (back then that was the International Time Bureau, or
|
|
BIH, for the French ``Bureau International de l'Heure'', but today the
|
|
torch has been passed to a combination of the International Bureau of
|
|
Weights and Measures, or BIPM, for the French ``Bureau International des
|
|
Poids et Mesures'' and the International Earth Rotation Service, who
|
|
have the gall to abbreviate the \emph{English} version of their name and
|
|
go by IERS) defined yet another time scale, in an attempt to achieve the
|
|
best of both worlds and make everybody happy. Enter Coordinated
|
|
Universal Time, or UTC - at last, something normal people have heard of!
|
|
|
|
The abbreviation UTC is a strange compromise between the English
|
|
abbreviation CUT and the French abbreviation TUC (for ``Temps Universel
|
|
Coordonné''). This is somewhat fitting, because UTC itself is a strange
|
|
compromise time scale between UT and TAI. Like TAI, UTC is an atomic
|
|
time scale. Every second of UTC is exactly as long as any other, using
|
|
the SI standard second based on caesium atoms, allowing scientists and
|
|
engineers around the world to calibrate their instruments and reliably
|
|
measure time intervals and frequencies very precisely. But whereas TAI
|
|
is destined to drift ever further away from UT, to the chagrin of
|
|
sailors and astronomers, UTC is kept synchronised closely enough with UT
|
|
that it allows seafarers to perform celestial navigation with sufficient
|
|
accuracy for safe ocean passage. This synchronisation is achieved, like
|
|
all technical compromises, using ugly hacks. It cannot be any other way,
|
|
as UTC is a stubborn attempt to reconcile two desirable but
|
|
fundamentally incompatible properties of a timescale: perfectly regular
|
|
seconds, and synchronisation with a spinning globe whose rate of
|
|
rotation is unpredictably irregular.
|
|
|
|
The precise nature of the ugly hack underlying UTC has changed somewhat
|
|
since it was first defined, but for almost 50 years now, starting in
|
|
1972, the ugly hack of choice has been the leap second. The way it works
|
|
is this. The difference between UTC and UT - a quantity denoted DUT - is
|
|
carefully monitored. Any time it looks like that difference is on track
|
|
to exceed 0.9 seconds, in either direction, UTC is kicked back into
|
|
alignment by either inserting or removing a single second on one
|
|
particular day. This makes UTC the \emph{only} time scale where the
|
|
number of seconds in a day is not absolutely fixed at 86,400 by
|
|
definition. There almost always \emph{are} 86,400 seconds in a UTC day,
|
|
but 86,401 and 86,399 are also allowed when necessary to keep the time
|
|
scale locked to the movement of the sun across the sky.
|
|
|
|
So far, there have been 27 leap seconds defined, although UTC and ATI
|
|
are today exactly 37 seconds apart - the other 10 seconds come from
|
|
hacks applied before leap seconds were established in 1972. All of them
|
|
to date have been insertions rather than removals. They don't happen on
|
|
a regular, predictable basis, like leap years (which are an adjustment
|
|
for the fact that the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun once,
|
|
defining a year, is not perfectly divisible by the time it takes the
|
|
Earth to rotate once, defining a day). Because the Earth's rate of
|
|
rotation fluctuates randomly, sometimes slowing down and sometimes
|
|
speeding up, astronomers need to be actively on the lookout for
|
|
excessive values of DUT. When it's decided a leap second is needed -
|
|
it's the IERS who makes that call - they are announced at least six
|
|
months in advance. They're allowed to occur on either June 30th or
|
|
December 31st, and are inserted or deleted at midnight UTC (which is the
|
|
middle of the day in some time zones, of course) on those days. At the
|
|
time of writing, the last leap second happened on December 31st, 2016.
|
|
In principle, six months is enough advance warning that nobody doing
|
|
anything which depends on precise time synchronisation should be caught
|
|
by surprise when a leap second rolls around. In practice, it's not
|
|
always so simple.
|
|
|
|
\section[Implementation Burden]{Increasing Implementation Burden and an Uncertain
|
|
Future}
|
|
|
|
Leap seconds have always had their critics, but at the time they were
|
|
adopted, their benefits arguably balanced their associated hassle. 50
|
|
years later, this hack is starting to show its age. The advent of cheap
|
|
and reliable GPS technology means that celestial navigation at sea is
|
|
now rarely a matter of life or death (although some sailors still
|
|
appreciate the relative simplicity of the technology it relies on),
|
|
removing some of the argument for making sure UTC stays in lock step
|
|
with the Earth's rotation. At the same time, the internet has come
|
|
along: a massive network of computers talking to each other, with the
|
|
frequent need for activity on one to be synchronised with activity on
|
|
another (hence tools like the Network Time Protocol, NTP). Computer
|
|
programmers \emph{hate} leap seconds, for the same reason they hate
|
|
Daylight Saving Time: they complicate time calculations (you can't
|
|
accurately calculate the number of seconds between two UTC timestamps
|
|
without consulting a table of when previous leap seconds were inserted)
|
|
and are a frequent cause of confusion and errors, when one system
|
|
implements them differently from another its trying to interoperate
|
|
with.
|
|
|
|
Affordances for leap seconds are often added to software as an
|
|
afterthought - if they are added at all. Some systems represent the
|
|
extra second using the timestamp 23:59:60, but others instead repeat the
|
|
timestamp 23:59:59 twice (since some software will fail to parse a
|
|
timestamp ending in :60). Other systems ``smear'' the leap second out
|
|
over longer time periods, like 24 hours, to avoid problems associated
|
|
with sudden discontinuities. This just leads to a whole day of small,
|
|
slowly varying errors compared to non-smearing systems. Some systems, of
|
|
course, forget to do anything at all. Because all the leap seconds to
|
|
date have been insertions rather than removals, it's a safe bet that
|
|
there's plenty of software out there which has worked correctly so far
|
|
but will fail the first time a second is removed. And the Earth's
|
|
rotation is going through a bit of a fast phase right now, so the first
|
|
negative leap second might be looming on the horizon.
|
|
|
|
The software interoperability situation at the time of a leap second is
|
|
bad enough that several major stock exchanges simply agreed to
|
|
voluntarily shut down for an hour around midnight UTC in 2016, rather
|
|
than risk problems by continuing to trade during the leap second. Given
|
|
that a number of major web services, including Amazon, Instagram,
|
|
Netflix and Twitter, experienced outages around this time, this was
|
|
probably not a bad idea. Of course, simply shutting time critical
|
|
services off for every leap second isn't always an option. It's one
|
|
thing to shut down the New York Stock Exchange for an hour, but Air
|
|
Traffic Control has to stay up 24/7. It's no surprise that increasingly
|
|
many voices in the tech industry are calling for leap seconds to be
|
|
abolished. Plenty of people are very unhappy with that idea, of course,
|
|
not to mention there's no consensus on what to do instead.
|
|
|
|
It's far from clear what the future holds for the leap second. As
|
|
software continues to eat the world, the headaches leap seconds cause
|
|
are only likely to get worse. The atomic definition of second likely
|
|
isn't going away any time soon, though, and that means that getting rid
|
|
of leap seconds entirely means abandoning the millennia old notion that
|
|
the way we represent time is intimately linked with the natural cycle of
|
|
night and day. Assuming we're not willing to do that, there are only two
|
|
alternatives: coming up with a new ugly hack which is somehow less
|
|
problematic, or giving up on a ``one size fits all'' time scale.
|
|
|
|
\section{But Wait, There's More!}
|
|
|
|
If you think this story has been needlessly fiddly and complicated, rest
|
|
assured I have skipped over a tonne of details. If you're actually
|
|
interested to learn more, I highly recommend the article ``The leap
|
|
second: its history and possible future'', which you can easily find on
|
|
the web (full citation below), along with, as always, following
|
|
Wikipedia links wherever they take you. Along the way you can learn the
|
|
difference between UT0, UT1 and UT2, meet other exciting astronomic and
|
|
atomic time scales like Ephemeris Time (ET), GPS Time (GPST) and
|
|
Terrestrial Time (TT), and discover that the SI system of units defined
|
|
the second based on something other than Earth's rotation when it was
|
|
established in 1960, seven years before the caesium definition was
|
|
adopted.
|
|
|
|
\end{multicols}
|
|
|
|
\section{References}
|
|
|
|
\begin{raggedright}
|
|
\hangindent=0.25cm
|
|
\hangafter=1
|
|
Nelson, R., McCarthy, D., Malys, S., Levine, J.M., Guinot, B., Fliegel,
|
|
H., Beard, R., \& Bartholomew, T. (2001). The Leap Second - Its History
|
|
and Possible Future. Metrologia, 38, 509-529.\\[4pt]
|
|
|
|
\hangindent=0.25cm
|
|
\hangafter=1
|
|
Ronningen, Ole Petter. ``Time-nuttery 101''. \href{https://efos3.com/TimeNut.html}{https://efos3.com/TimeNut.html}\\[4pt]
|
|
|
|
\hangindent=0.25cm
|
|
\hangafter=1
|
|
Allen, Steve. ``UTC might be redefined without Leap Seconds''. \href{https://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescales.html}{https://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescales.html}\\
|
|
\end{raggedright}
|
|
|
|
\chapter{The Hearth of the Matter}
|
|
by durtal
|
|
|
|
\begin{multicols}{3}
|
|
|
|
\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{I}{t seems} that Kepler first used the Latin word `focus' in 1604 to refer
|
|
to `the point of convergence' in the mathematical sphere. It is possible
|
|
that this is an analogical use of the term and may reference the point
|
|
of light created with a lens. You probably know what I mean. I remember
|
|
another child showing me a trick with a magnifying glass outside one
|
|
sunny day. He quickly adjusted the glass's height over my forearm to
|
|
effect a sharp pain as the converging rays burned a hole in my skin.
|
|
|
|
Hobbes brought `focus' into broader English parlance nearly fifty years
|
|
later. I don't know if he did this with a magnifying glass or not. But,
|
|
Hobbes is certainly not my favourite philosopher. With its particular
|
|
take on human nature, he published Leviathan about the same time he
|
|
popularised a word whose use is ubiquitous but whose original meaning is
|
|
too often unknown. Sometimes the abstractions of science and a specific
|
|
sort of philosophy separate us from the mundane realities of life in
|
|
unfortunate ways.
|
|
|
|
Ironically, the political philosopher who espoused that humans are ``all
|
|
take and little give'' used a word that belied his contentions in the
|
|
original. Focus is the Latin equivalent of the Old English word
|
|
`hearth'. People still used the latter term in my youth, especially in
|
|
rural regions. Phrases like ``hearth and home'' and ``keep the home
|
|
fires burning'' catch something of its ethos. The hearth was where
|
|
household members gathered to cook or to work by the hearthstone's
|
|
firelight. In its warmth, children sat to hear the stories of the family
|
|
and community after dusk. Kith and kin entertained themselves with music
|
|
and drinking and dance nearby. In some cultures, families kept ancestral
|
|
bones beneath the hearthstone. Here was a point of convergence in the
|
|
human habitat.
|
|
|
|
The rising or setting sun reminds me of a hearth fire as it converges on
|
|
the horizon. I know what it is to wait in anticipation for the warmth of
|
|
a fire on a cold winter's morning. Other's gather close to you, hoping
|
|
to absorb a little of your body's heat while they wait too. You each rub
|
|
and blow warm breaths onto your hands and comment on the cold, and you
|
|
remark on the day ahead. As the kindling catches, hope builds and
|
|
blossoms as the flames devour the larger pieces of wood. The fire roars
|
|
madly as you back away, waiting for the wooden pyramid to collapse. When
|
|
there are coals left mostly, you cook your breakfast over them and drink
|
|
your morning coffee. You smile and share a joke or two with your
|
|
fellows. One of them ruefully remembers that it is his day to do the
|
|
dishes; they are piling up as the others finish and go. This time, like
|
|
its later double, is a short space of intimacy before separation.
|
|
|
|
By analogy, sunrise is like the birth of a child for whom the family
|
|
cares. Such brief familial intimacy is still most often the case for the
|
|
young. But, not so for the elderly. We fill the noon meridians of our
|
|
lives so completely with striving and drift so far from one another
|
|
that, too often, family members no longer live near to one another at
|
|
the sunset of a loved one's life. Now others, not family members, nurse
|
|
the frail and wash their bodies late in life and at its very end.
|
|
Frequently, there is only the intimacy of strangers who alone know where
|
|
the bare bones of our final days lie before we slip into the deep dark
|
|
of death's night. This is all that the world offers in this day when
|
|
hearth fires and home are all but forgotten. We now only focus camera
|
|
lenses (automatically).
|
|
|
|
Did old Thomas Hobbes have a point?
|
|
\end{multicols}
|
|
|
|
|
|
\chapter{Why I Still Game Proprietary}
|
|
by wholesomedonut
|
|
|
|
\begin{multicols}{3}
|
|
|
|
\section{Proprietary Gaming Isn't All
|
|
Bad}
|
|
|
|
\lettrine[lines=2, slope=4pt, findent=3pt, nindent=0pt]{S}{ince} getting into the FOSS community, I see a lot of pushback towards
|
|
the gaming industry as a whole. I can see why: DRM runs rampant,
|
|
terrible business practices regularly conflagrate internet forums,
|
|
anti-cheat programs are basically consensual (and mandatory for official
|
|
online play in some cases) trojans, and to make it all worse it costs a
|
|
mint to get into the hobby nowadays due to scalpers and crypto miners
|
|
running rampant in the market.
|
|
|
|
I agree with all of those observations. They tire me. They concern me.
|
|
They frustrate me daily.
|
|
|
|
However! There are still reasons -not- to go the route of some I see in
|
|
the FOSS world and eschew gaming altogether on anything but a FOSS
|
|
platform, with FOSS games, because\ldots FOSS. That argument is just as
|
|
dumb in practice, because it's an artificial limitation that stands on
|
|
somewhat subjective, opinionated reasoning. ``But wholesomedonut, thou
|
|
angereth me!'' I hear in the imaginary comments section because this is
|
|
Gemini and you can't do that. I am certain you will find peace through
|
|
measured contemplation and a cup of whatever warm or cold liquid you
|
|
enjoy.
|
|
|
|
\section{Why Do I Use Steam?}
|
|
|
|
Well\ldots everyone else that isn't a computer nerd usually does too.
|
|
And the overhead for getting people of minimum technical understanding
|
|
(that like playing video games) into FOSS gaming generally is much more
|
|
costly in terms of mental and social capacity than the clout I usually
|
|
have with my friends or family on such matters.
|
|
|
|
King's English: If I have to instruct them to download the latest
|
|
version of the game directly from Github in the Releases tab, or from
|
|
some random website they've never heard of (even if it looks nice and is
|
|
HTTPS secure) instead of just adding it on Steam or Epic or Microsoft
|
|
Store or PS/Xbox or some-other thing, there is a solid 90\% chance I'm
|
|
going to lose that argument unless they are very specifically interested
|
|
in that particular kind of game, its' content, or have a better
|
|
socially-driven reason. This comes from years of trying and f'nagling
|
|
with people from many walks of life; the UI and UX of FOSS gaming needs
|
|
to be on-par with modern commercial offerings; this means all the way
|
|
from landing on a page, to funneling through a sales conversion or free
|
|
download, to playing the game with their friends needs to be
|
|
understandable, unobtrusive and transparent. That is, if the overall
|
|
userbase is to grow and sustain itself on a higher magnitude than
|
|
current.
|
|
|
|
\subsection[Benefit of the Doubt]{Give People the Benefit of the
|
|
Doubt}
|
|
|
|
People are intelligent, generally. They're very skilled in a multitude
|
|
of things that aren't computers. But asking someone who \emph{isn't} tech
|
|
savvy to figure out how to pull down the right version of a FOSS game
|
|
from a code repo (or heaven forbid build it themselves with cmake or
|
|
whatever) is like asking ME to diagnose a car's problems using nothing
|
|
but a flashlight and a screwdriver. I have no idea what the hell I'm
|
|
doing anyway in that department. Without the proper tools and education
|
|
too? I'm screwed. Therefore I urge empathy and patience in introducing
|
|
others to FOSS gaming. It's a bit more finicky than the plug-and-play
|
|
mentality commercial systems have fostered.
|
|
|
|
\section{Enter the Mech Man}
|
|
|
|
A good example of a FOSS game that has plenty of good and bad would be
|
|
MegaMek. It's basically a fully computerized version of the Classic
|
|
Battletech rules, which is a board game that's existed since the 1980s
|
|
and is going on 40 years of conniving, number-crunching tomfoolery that
|
|
only a particular subset of people even enjoy. All in the name of
|
|
combined-arms strategy on a hex board that involves groups of multi-ton
|
|
robots, tanks, airplanes and infantry taking and giving damage to
|
|
individual components, weapons and armor locations in a somewhat
|
|
realistic and highly detailed simulation of 31st-century warfare.
|
|
|
|
To alleviate the issue of significant calculational overhead for
|
|
every-single-action-attack-or-damage-roll-ever, this program does all of
|
|
the math, calculations, and rules proofing for you. So you can enjoy the
|
|
game with others, wherever they may be, instead of reaching for your
|
|
G.A.T.O.R. card for the tenth time to show the newbie of the group what
|
|
happens when an SRM-6 missile spread hits a light vehicle whose armor is
|
|
already exposed on its' left flank. There are plenty of grognards out
|
|
there who know these rules well and can do half the game in their head:
|
|
they're obviously not the target of this article.
|
|
|
|
I shiver at the thought of doing all that stuff manually if I don't have
|
|
to. That kind of tedium takes away from the moment-by-moment gameplay,
|
|
forcing everybody to get ox-in-the-mired over details that don't matter
|
|
overall instead of letting their big stompy robots blow each other up.
|
|
|
|
Megamek works wonders in that regard. A game of Classic Battletech that
|
|
could easily take 5 or 6 hours in person without any sort of calculator
|
|
apps or an otherwise breakneck pace of gameplay and rules-lawyering will
|
|
only take an hour or two maximum with Megamek. It's a godsend for a
|
|
hobby that would otherwise be relegated to local play over predetermined
|
|
days, not a ``Hey want to play a match? Sure!'' kind of casual pickup on
|
|
a boring afternoon.
|
|
|
|
\subsection[Sunshine and Rainbows]{But It Isn't All Sunshine and Rainbows.}
|
|
|
|
Nope! Megamek is, in my humble and donut-shaped opinion, a terrible
|
|
example of UI and UX. I played a round recently, and another aficionado
|
|
of the series played against me. Quoth my opponent: ``This program looks
|
|
like something out of Windows 95.'' Neither of us had played the most
|
|
recent version of the game. I hadn't touched it in a year at least.
|
|
|
|
Some changes were welcome, and the development progresses smoothly. But
|
|
it's still just as much a spaghetti plate in terms of user experience:
|
|
configuration options laid out in long lists of check boxes organized by
|
|
multiple top-window tabs; a decidedly 15-years-old design language that
|
|
clashes with modern perceptions of UI and UX (which is bad considering
|
|
that taking in new blood is crucial for both userbase and developer
|
|
contribution reasons); and the final nail in the coffin is the fact that
|
|
the much easier and more recent Alpha Strike ruleset isn't included at
|
|
all by default, to my knowledge. You might be able to configure
|
|
something like that using plugins, but we're already putting the cart
|
|
before the horse at that point.
|
|
|
|
\subsection{To Be Fair}
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|
|
|
The project started in 2000. It's 21 years old in some places, if only
|
|
in logic and not literal syntax. It's written in Java. And it's been a
|
|
community effort by dozens of talented people over the decades. The fact
|
|
that it's alive at all is impressive, but so's the fact that the
|
|
franchise whose boardgame it emulates even has a fanbase still. BT fans
|
|
aren't quitters, certainly. And this is all considering the fact that
|
|
trying to automate, obfuscate and de-FUBAR the mountain of minutiae that
|
|
Battletech's rulesets and technical data (on a per unit and per variant
|
|
basis no less) is a monumental task. I can hardly think of a video-game
|
|
adaptation of a more complex board game that does a better job, in
|
|
proportion to the complexity of the physical source material and
|
|
gameplay flow.
|
|
|
|
So considering it was made in the waning days of Win98 (because Windows
|
|
ME doesn't exist and you can't convince me otherwise) it's expected that
|
|
it's ugly as most things were back then. It was written in Java (yea
|
|
verily, begone foul JVM!), which for all its' foibles makes a very easy
|
|
cross-platform distributable program. It's solidly a relic of an earlier
|
|
time of online gaming, where dial-up connections were still common.
|
|
That's a given. And it is what it is. I won't waste time bemoaning those
|
|
facts that are immutable in this context. I'm only stating them to set
|
|
the stage.
|
|
|
|
\section[Interesting Impasse]{I'm Left at an Interesting
|
|
Impasse}
|
|
|
|
There is no other way I could ever play Battletech with friends from all
|
|
over the world in such a great degree of fidelity. Megamek serves its'
|
|
purpose very well for what it is: a highly detailed computerization of a
|
|
niche franchise that has a fanbase spanning generations. However, it
|
|
also stands out to me as one of the prime examples of a FOSS project
|
|
being understandably opaque to newcomers. It's hard to use at first,
|
|
hard to look at always, and sometimes hard to find other people to play
|
|
it with. Those three things will nail the coffin of any fledgling game
|
|
shut. That concept is true regardless of genre, art style, or UI/UX.
|
|
|
|
So, I leave it to you to put the pieces together here. I can choose to
|
|
play with average people that A) aren't technically inclined, B) don't
|
|
have a heart that beats for free-as-in-freedom, and C) want something
|
|
that ``just works,'' or confine myself to a much smaller content base
|
|
with an even smaller playerbase to share it with.
|
|
|
|
Call me the gaming nerd Whore of Babylon, but I don't see the point in
|
|
beating my head against the wall overtly trying to make my hobby free
|
|
and open if there isn't a platform for those newcomers to even stand on
|
|
and explore once (or if ever) they choose to get involved in FOSS gaming
|
|
of their own volition.
|
|
|
|
\section{At the End of the Day}
|
|
|
|
I encourage people who play video games which are also interested in
|
|
free and open source software to consider the prospect of inviting
|
|
others into this world of free-as-in-freedom/beer/whatever with a grain
|
|
of salt. Until we make it easier to onboard new people from all walks of
|
|
life, significant adoption of FOSS systems or the games that run on them
|
|
will not be seen. And therefore we will not see the requisite uptick in
|
|
talent, contribution and playerbase that will consequently drive a
|
|
growth in production quality, variety, and competitiveness in the market
|
|
space of people's free time.
|
|
|
|
\end{multicols}
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\begin{center}
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|
external email: wholesomedonut at tuta dot io \\*
|
|
mastodon: at wholesomedonut at fosstodon dot org\\*
|
|
matrix: at wholesomedonut colon matrix dot org
|
|
\end{center}
|
|
\backmatter
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|
\thispagestyle{empty}
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\mbox{}
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\clearpage
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\end{document}
|