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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   2441 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 20, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Watched Hail Mary in theaters. I read the book beforehand and saw it with a friend that had not read the book.

We both enjoyed it, really good movie.

Movie was more cinematic, less science heavy than the book, which was probably a very good choice. Still had the same heartfelt moments.

I can scarcely remember the last time I watched a movie in theaters. When I introspect, I never thought I was someone who ever quit watching the occasional movie, rather they just quit making the ones I’m willing to take a chance on.

Recently I caught part of Scanner Cop II (yeah, the 5th and last installment in the not-so-great B movie franchise) and it made me somewhat reminisce over movies of the 80’s and 90’s. There was just a certain quality of that time period that made those movies interesting to watch, in a way that I suppose the maturity of the cinematic industry overtime has left movies feeling hollow on the inside.

I do feel like theaters have been chasing a gimmick that will bring back moviegoers but ultimately it's good movies that would bring people out.

The theater I saw Hail Mary in had special vibrating and slightly rotating seats as their latest gimmick. I hadn't been to a theater in a while so I thought sure I'd try this out. It had two bad moments: one where I felt like some little kid was just kicking my seat and another when it pre jumped a jump scare. Some weird moments where I thought during a lull and sappy moment it was moving like a rocking chair. And mostly slightly positive moments where it was adding to the soundscape of the movie through vibration without having to blow out my eardrums.

It was a good movie with good cinematic moments. But if I had the option of watching it in my basement with my ~70 inch screen, with no worries about volume, with the same friend, and on my nice comfortable couch ... I'd choose at home.

The movie theater won out in this instance because I didn't want to wait, and inviting my friend over to watch a movie on my couch at noon is weird compared to inviting him to watch it at a movie theater with me.

The new head of the Jalisco New Generation cartel is a United States Citizen born in California.

MAGA is bringing foreign jobs home. U-S-A, U-S-A.

I hope he pays tax on his income earned abroad.

Anybody playing Crimson Desert?

I heard someone refer to it as a "game for content-lovers". That is precisely what it is, a ton of random bullshit to do, with a nonsensical main plot and highly uneven side quests.

I'm not surprised, since it's basically an MMORPG retrofitted into a single player one, by devs who've made MMOs for over a decade. Looks gorgeous, combat doesn't look bad, but is wide as an ocean and shallow as a puddle. Being able to pet cats and climb trees doesn't make up for a near total absence of actual RP.

Absolutely not for me, at the very least.

In general, I have never understood this fixation on "content" and "replayability" in games and this denigration of linearity, which ends up being reflected in every new game trend ranging from roguelikes to open-world games to (most recently) immersive sims. It always just ends up feeling like yes, there's theoretically massive or even unbounded replayability, but in practice almost none of this variation is meaningful; it's the game equivalent of finding variation in a pine forest, ceaseless randomly-generated content featuring all of the same building blocks. Unless you're treating the game just as a tool to occupy your fingers, one's actual interest in it wanes very fast, and the prioritisation of endless "player agency" and endless "replayability" often means that you have to sacrifice any sense of satisfying pacing and progression. Don't even get me started on the de-prioritisation of meaningful narrative as a casualty of this focus. It's an approach that reduces games to absolute brainrot.

I really hate all of these terms that games get judged by now. It's almost as if we were having the whole Games As Art thing a while back where a lot of developers briefly tried to make games indistinguishable from movies with extra interactivity, and then we overcorrected quickly and basically treated games as glorified content farms, which we still haven't come back from after years and years of genericised slop. A lot of players have a serious problem with viewing games like a product, as if the measuring stick for a game's quality is how many hours one could theoretically get out of it, and this really fucks up how games get designed.

The ultimate “replayability” is not to be found in any game where the story and drama are largely driven by the non-player controlled characters and environment, which is most games. Player vs Environment is much more popular as a core game type than Player vs Player, yet its only in the games where the drama is overwhelming driven by player actions creating constantly emerging content where true replayability can be found in my opinion.

The problem with this is that 99% of obligate PvP games are short iteration, high twitch reaction, high skill: 1st person shooters. FPS have a strong filter for a certain player type and have very few opportunities for the players to drive the content. Other games have excellent PvP systems but it’s a sideshow that is entirely avoidable if you aren’t interested in it, like Guild Wars, or never re-iterate, like Eve online. The trick is medium term iteration (a single “match” takes anywhere from a week to a month to finish), slower pacing, still obligate PvP, but much of the competition between the players takes place outside of direct face to face combat in gathering and refining resources and producing weapons and building fortresses that take 20 people multiple days to finish constructing. A thousand people on both sides, or more. Imagine an RTS type game, except all the pawns are players. 0 bots. And the match takes two weeks to a month with the medium term pacing. Only a handful of games have tried this and they’ve all eventually failed. The only game out there right now that gets close is called Foxhole, a war simulator with two factions that are permanent enemies, every weapon and bullet are made by players sans a small amount of starting weapons, almost every defense structure is player built, complex industrial chains are needed for advanced items, massive amounts of resources requiring dozens of people working together for days to make 1 battleship/super tank. A month long RTS with no bots or AI NPCs. 1-3k players online together in a single game world. It’s almost the same map every war, the developers make gradual adjustments over time. It has a level of genuine risk of losing all your efforts and hours invested in any particular war while you’re asleep that few games are comfortable with. For me the extremity of negative experience you can have in Foxhole, thousands of manhours of work lost to an ambush or nighttime raid, is a huge part of the draw. Very few major studios will ever publish something that they know has common content interactions that can drive the players into a berserk rage (souls types excluded, this is their thing too). I get bored very fast with any multiplayer game with training wheels rules to protect the slow and soft. And no loss is ever for very long: the next war is never more than a month away and you get to try again with grand plans and a lot of “this time we’re doing it differently” planning with your friends. Fully 60% of people who try Foxhole hate it immediately, another 30% grow to hate it in one war. The remainder become obsessed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=YE5bPhKpoWU

Content and replayability are not the same.

The joy of replayability is in experiencing something again. In well designed games that teach mastery in the player, a replay is a demonstration of knowledge, skill, and familiarity gained from the first experience. A first run of Dark Souls may take dozens of hours; a replay may take a third or a quarter as long.

Content is a blanket term I hate, because it implies there is no difference between content. But people are poor, and they are seeking More Content for their dollar, so they don't care if it's slop as long as they don't go hungry. The error content producers tend to make is that there are different kinds of poor; as someone time-poor I want higher quality content I can experience in less time.

Also, the way people experience games now is just different. Games in the 8-bit console era were actually very short, but they also often assumed very low completion rates. Games in the WoW era all wanted to be a second lifestyle with a monthly subscription. Now I'm not sure, but something does seem kind of wrong when the latest Resident Evil, a product of a long and tortured development and crucial decisions taken years in advance about the future of the franchise, drops and the community's reaction is where's the rest?

Replayability (or replay value) is not new; it's been used to judge games for decades. It makes a lot of sense if you are time-rich and money-poor, like a student; you buy a new title every few months and hope it keeps you entertained as long as possible. For full-time working adults, it makes a lot less sense.

It's always been a trait that people consider positive, but there are tradeoffs and at least to my recollection, there was a time when a lower relative value was placed on its importance (specifically a certain era when a lot of story-based games came out, indie and triple-A alike). There's inherent tension between many of the goals a game can aspire to, and at the moment more emphasis seems to be placed on conceptual ideas based around "player agency", "nonlinearity", "replayability", and other such concepts that actively interfere with the ability to satisfyingly curate and pace a game. Rare is the game that actually manages to balance these goals.

I do agree that replayability makes a bit more sense for those time-rich and money-poor. But it's also somewhat dependent on whether you're personally receptive to the addiction-adjacent feedback loops that these games actively try to foster. I've been in this situation before, and still would not buy a game like that, my preference ranking tends to prioritise ephemeral but memorable experiences over less impactful experiences that can be stretched for longer. It doesn't take long for my enjoyment level of a game to hit the point where I have better things to look at and read and do, rather than play it for the 116th time. Your mileage may vary though.

Good rant, it has my endorsement. "Content" is a very poor standard for the quality of a game: meaningful, interesting content is far harder to create than churning out procedural junk or trying to fake it with busywork.

I've sometimes been slightly miffed when a very enjoyable game ends too quickly, but I am far more regularly frustrated by games that try and pad things out. Crimson Desert, Starfield, etc, not that I'm going to bother to play either.

On the other hand, games like Arma 3 (4000 hours), Rimworld and Total War Warhammer as a series (1500 hours each) and a few others? They have interesting mechanics, player-driven interactions, a world that is never the same twice, and usually extensive modding support for when the base game gets stale. Those hours were fun, I was engaged instead of just trying to stay busy. That is awfully, unfortunately rare for games these days.

"Content" is a very poor standard for the quality of a game: meaningful, interesting content is far harder to create than churning out procedural junk or trying to fake it with busywork.

Hard agree. I like to point to Chrono Trigger as a great example of this: yeah, the game is only 20 hours long, but it's tight. They trimmed every bit of fat off that game, so that you're never sitting around doing busy work or enduring an area that goes on long past when it's interesting. I'll take that any day over a game which is 100 hours but only 30% of that time is actually interesting.

Still waiting for more base PS5 performance reviews. Too lazy to build a PC and not willing to upgrade to PS5 Pro.

I'm playing on PC and it looks great, but I've heard mixed things about base PS5, a lot of FUD though it seems, waiting for legit reviews seems like a good plan.

Slightly tempted but thinking it would likely be a waste of money and time.

Are you?

Yep, it seems simultaneously better than I could have imagined (yes you really do have that much shit to do and options for things) and worse than hoped (Korean slop writing).

It's been a great "watch low effort video content" while playing game so far, but I can understand if that's enough to justify the price.

What are your favorite games ever? Just to help me gauge where you are coming from when entering this game.

I'm not an open world guy, although my favorite on that front is The Witcher 3. It's also far too early for me to say if it is good or not, but I can say it delivers on the sheer number of things to do.

Got it. Rumor says it was started as an MMO project, which could partly explain its strengths and weaknesses, I guess.

Edit: typo.

MST3K is coming back for 4 episodes on the Rifftrax platform and theaters. Granted, Rifftrax has been running for something like 20 years, so the concept never really gone, but this time the puppets are back.

In light of that, what are your favorites of the originals? Mine in no order, and as I list these, I see I'm definitely a fan of the Mike era:
The Final Sacrifice (Rowsdower!)
Time Chasers
Riding with Death
Space Mutiny
Laserblast

Werewolf for sure. "The future conditional pluperfect subjunctive" is an all time riff.

What I've always said regarding the Joel vs Mike thing, is that the two main pillars of the MST3K appeal are the humor and the cozy "hangin'-with-buds" vibes, and each guy excelled more in one. Mike was funnier, Joel was cozier; Mike had a mean streak, Joel bemusingly poked fun. Who's better depends on what mood you're in.

Also, some people say Joel's skits were better, but...hot take, I always hated the skits, they're almost all skippable. I find the biggest barrier to entry when trying to introduce people to the show is getting them to sit through 5 minutes of Kevin Murphy in a monkey suit before the actual comedy starts.

I like to listen to podcast-type material while working on art projects, and came across this biography of a Royal Navy officer who specialized in fighting convoy protection and anti-submarine warfare in the second World War.

Frederick 'Johnnie' Walker - Gladiator of the Convoys

It's a four-part series, so a couple hours of listening time, but as a teaser, here's Walker's epitaph:

"In the day when the waters had well-nigh overwhelmed us, our brother here departed, apprehending the creative power in man, set himself to the task to conquer the malice of the enemy. In our hour of need he was the doughty protector of them that sailed the seas on our behalf. His heart and his mind extended and expanded to the utmost tiring of the body even unto death; that he might discover and operate means of saving ships from the treacherous foes. Truly many, very many, were saved because he was not disobedient to his vision. Victory has been won and should be won by such as he. May there never be wanting in this realm a succession of men of like spirit in discipline, imagination and valour, humble and unafraid. Not dust, nor the light weight of a stone, but all the sea of the Western Approaches shall be his tomb."

"Escort Commander" about the same fellow was one of my favorites when I was young. Damn good book about one hell of a man.

Chuck Norris dead at the age of 86. RIP.

The reason I'm putting it in the fun thread is that my first exposure to him was via "Chuck Norris facts", an early 2000s internet meme so old that I think it literally predated the term "internet meme". These were outlandish examples of Norris's awesome skills in the cardinal domains of mortal combat, womanising and lovemaking. I think someone even gave me a paperback book compiling the best examples from the website of the same name. Aside from his very brief cameo in Dodgeball, I still have not seen any of Norris's movies or TV shows, nor do I intend to.

My favourite Chuck Norris facts:

  • Chuck Norris once went to the Virgin Islands. They are now called the Islands.
  • Wilt Chamberlain claims to have had sex with 20,000 women in his life. Chuck Norris calls this a "slow Tuesday".

For some reason my memory of Chuck Norris was blended with my memory of WoW. Maybe because of Barrens Chat?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/249062-world-of-warcraft-classic/41897772

Notably, Chuck Norris facts were a more popular variation of earlier Vin Diesel facts.

  • The anagram of "Vin Diesel" is "I end lives"

Britney Spears was also an anagram for Presbyterians.

Chuck Norris is so fast he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.

Chuck Norris knows Victoria's Secret.

There is no evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live.

Chuck Norris created giraffes when he hit a horse with an uppercut.

Chuck Norris can speak French in Russian.

Chuck Norris doesn't turn the lights on, he turns the dark off.

Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird.

Chuck Norris once told a woman to calm down, and she did.

Chuck Norris created giraffes when he hit a horse with an uppercut.

This is such a funny mental image, in addition to being a weirdly Lysenkoist joke.

an early 2000s internet meme so old that I think it literally predated the term "internet meme"

Ahem

The term "meme" was coined in 1976. That's three decades earlier than Chuck Norris Facts which appeared in early 2005. As far as old school internet memes go, Chuck Norris Facts is almost something of a newcomer compared to eg. All Your Base Are Belong To Us which did the rounds starting from 1999.

The word meme was was not commonly used to refer to internet memes until ~2008, and then only in contexts outside of where memes developed. There was a period where no one who made or disseminated memes ever referred to them as “memes” and doing so was seen as passé. This changed with the popularity of Reddit, but we have now returned to a period where memes are no longer referred to as such — contagious social transmissions are now “trends”, or just “images” if referring to images that go viral as reaction comments on shortform social media. It is an interesting fact to explore that the surest way to disrupt the popularity of a meme is to call it a “meme”, filing it away immediately at a category of ephemeral expression soon to be forgotten.

I understand the vintage of the term "meme". What I meant was that I don't remember people referring to Chuck Norris facts as an "internet meme" contemporaneously. My recollection is that, at the time, we just called them "internet jokes" or similar.

Death Chuck Norrised at the age of 4,000,000,000. RIP.

Some of you may recall my write-up on the African Cup of Nations final a couple months back. Well, I'm pleased to announce that the crazy AFCON drama is not actually at an end. To recap: Senegal defeated Morocco in a highly contested final. Throughout the tournament, I'd heard black African fans complain that "the Arabs" are bribing the refs to help Morocco and Egypt against sub-Saharan nations, and the ref made himself a big part of the game. In the last minutes of the game, he ruled out a Senegal goal for a very soft foul, then awarded Morocco a penalty for an even softer one (on what would have been the last play before the game breaks to extra time, if a goal is not scored). Senegalese fans started fighting the Moroccans, a delay is announced, the Senegalese players get into an argument on the pitch and storm off into the dressing room. Eventually, their captain runs in, convinces them to come back out, the penalty is set up - and Morocco flubs it in embarrassing fashion. Senegal wins with a smashing goal in extra time, cue massive celebrations (including my family jumping around waving a knockoff Senegalese jersey in the air).

But, it's not over.

59 days after the final, CAF, the body administrating African football/soccer, officially stripped Senegal of the title. Their reasoning is that, by leaving the pitch without the authorization of the referee, Senegal forfeited the match, and therefore Morocco is awarded a 3-0 victory (as is standard for forfeits in football). They also fined Morocco for some of their infringements, like, uh, having their ball boys steal towels and water bottles from the Senegalese goalkeeper.

Senegal, of course, is not taking this lying down. Their government has announced they will appeal the verdict and called for an investigation into CAF corruption. An Senegalese member of the CAF Executive Committee publicly slammed the decision. The Senegalese coach, already sanctioned by CAF due to the scuffle during the final, has reportedly taken the trophy to a military base for safe-keeping.

Now, the appeal itself seems simple: were the rules broken? And it would be simple, anywhere but Africa. Let's take a look: the CAF board cites Senegal as violating Articles 82 and 84 of the CAF rules. See here:

ARTICLE 82 If, for any reason whatsoever, a team withdraws from the competition or does not report for a match, or refuses to play or leaves the ground before the regular end of the match without the authorisation of the referee, it shall be considered looser [sic] and shall be eliminated for good from the current competition. The same shall apply for the teams previously disqualified by decision of CAF.

ARTICLE 83 A team that shall not be present on the ground, dressed to play at the time fixed for kick-off or at most 15 minutes later, shall forfeit the match. The referee shall register the absence of the team and shall write it in his report. The Organising Committee shall take the final decision in this respect.

ARTICLE 84 The team which contravenes the provisions of articles 82 and 83 shall be eliminated for good from the competition. This team will lose its match by 3-0 unless the opponent has scored a more advantageous result at the time when the match was interrupted, in this case this score will be maintained. The Organising Committee may adopt further measures

Let's think about this. Senegal cannot have violated Article 84. In fact, Article 84 only applies to no-shows, because it clearly states that a team must contravene the provisions of articles 82 and 83. Article 82, if it applies, would state that Senegal is "looser" and eliminated from the competition, but has no provision to award Morocco the 3-0 win in particular. Furthermore, Article 82, unlike 83, does not provide for the final decision of the Organising Committee in the article, it seems to be up to the referee's judgement. And the referee did not disqualify Senegal. He let them play on, and no statement from him revising that is addressed by CAF. Is there precedent for this? Well, in 1976, in the game that won them their first-ever AFCON title, Morocco's players walked off the field in protest at the referee and stopped play for 15 minutes. Their title stood.

I hope for good luck for Senegal in the Court for Arbitration of Sport (the international court in Switzerland which oversees football as well as e.g. the Olympics), both for their sake and for the drama that will result. It's also worth noting that, if Morocco and Senegal both finish second in their groups in the World Cup (likely, both are comfortably the second-best team in their groups), and both win their first knockout game (tougher - Senegal would have an easy one, but Morocco would face Japan or the Netherlands), we will see a very juicy rematch in New York...

They also fined Morocco for some of their infringements, like, uh, having their ball boys steal towels and water bottles from the Senegalese goalkeeper.

This is incorrect: they actually lifted/reduced some of the fines that had previously been imposed on Morocco for their conduct.

It really is an incredibly outward display of corruption.

You're right, should have read that more carefully, the fines were imposed by the disciplinary board and reduced on appeal (lol).

As a Gambian I'm torn. I don't want Senegal to do too well on principle but the alternative is Morocco and the incompetents who officiated this. Kinda have to root for them I guess.

The accounts I'm seeing are malding for a different reason though: this validates the claims (made by Jamie Carragher for example) that AFCON isn't a serious tourney.

I think it is, uh, difficult to call CAF a serious organization, much like FIFA when it comes to stuff like the Qatar World Cup and the inevitable future Saudi World Cup, or the Premier League when it comes to Man City. But the seriousness of a tournament is, thankfully, not determined by the organizers - it's determined by the passion of the fans and players, and AFCON has that in spades (no thanks to Morocco, who seemingly did everything in their power to exclude fans from getting tickets).

I’m writing this post on the behest of @100ProofTollBooth who asked me to explain my industry (e-commerce) and AI’s effect on it. I apologize in advance if this is not interesting or not what you had in mind when asking, but since I’m easily flattered I’m happy to talk about myself for a bit.

So to explain how I got where I am now I need to explain my background. I have a BA in fashion design. I started a fashion line around the time that I graduated college, which was very fun and somewhat successful. I sold some of my designs at boutiques in NYC and Asia which had always been a dream of mine and that was awesome. I maintained the line for about 7 years until 2020, when a variety of factors pushed me to end the line. It was partially covid making things weird and difficult, it was partially my waning interest in the aesthetic I was working in, but most importantly I was itching to travel and leave the US for a while which would be impossible while I was chained down to a studio with a proper line. So I pivoted around 2020 to focusing on my side gigs. I had done a bit of freelance design for a few brands but I really disliked working with other people (even if one of the designers I worked with was a dream designer who I still respect a lot.) My brand I had managed entirely online through a direct to customer model (outside of the wholesale boutiques I mentioned earlier.) So I was familiar with e-commerce through that (as well as having shopped online since 3rd grade as a customer- I still have the same ebay account I opened when I was 11, I’m proud of this.)

Anyway, while I worked on my brand I also dabbled in the Print on Demand industry. The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble. (More on that later.) But anyway, as I wanted the freedom to travel and fulfill orders while making money away from a studio, I decided to pivot away from my physical brand’s business and move entirely into print on demand. This was a combination of through platforms like Redbubble and traditional marketplaces like ebay, Etsy and amazon.

Today I make over 90% of my yearly earned income from print on demand items that I design myself. Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever. All of these things are not very exciting to me so I am glad I can innovate on design and product offering as a designer rather than having to think about marketing (I hate advertising, I do not pay for ads for my products, I block every ad, I feel like dying when I see an ad irl etc etc)

Hopefully this all makes sense, I am being slightly vague in certain specifics just because it’s a highly competitive industry and I don’t want to be too helpful but I think you can get a broad sense of what I do from the above. Now to respond directly to @100ProofTollBooth’s questions, paraphrased slightly for format reasons:

A) What is my perspective on my industry?

I guess I can answer this from a few different industry perspectives. I will answer about fashion, about Print on Demand, and about e-commerce in general.

I think the fashion industry as a whole is not really terrible. I do think that the industry does drive innovation and prioritize creativity and artistry from people. In certain segments of the industry there is an attempt at conserving craft and tradition that I think is valuable. Being a female dominated industry it does have a tendency to foment woke witch hunts (John Galliano’s firing from Dior is still terrible, I suspect McQueen’s suicide probably had some degree of disillusionment from the politics of fashion for example) but people seem broadly to be over this currently and have some understanding of the cringeness of being that way.

The print on demand industry- as a designer, I value the industry a lot, as it offers me massive flexibility and a huge opportunity to make money without having to put in hardly any investment into inventory or development. I may only make a margin of 25% or less on each individual item I sell but the flexibility it offers is very good. Admittedly my switch from fully designed luxury goods under my own label to basically utilitarian POD items was a bit of a blow to my ego but the advantage of being able to get paid for very little work helps soften the blow.

Ecommerce in general. I think it’s good. It is basically a glorified Sears catalogue mail order service. It isn’t much different today from how that worked back in the 1800s. Amazon’s 2 day shipping is great when it’s available. Aliexpress and temu are really crazy, it reminds me of markets I shopped at in Thailand, where everything is incredibly cheap and abundant, of course giving those sellers access to the US market who are willing to pay American prices for their goods is a huge trade imbalance that benefits both third world middlemen and low and middle income Americans. Many Asia based drop shippers infringe designs that I’ve made and sell them on platforms like walmart.com. It is so ubiquitous that I have stopped looking and issuing takedown requests. I am not a fan and wish they would not do that.

B) AI’s effect on my industry

I suspect AI is changing a lot of things behind the scenes in fashion companies in ways that are not visible in their marketing, product offering or brand messaging. I have noticed a lot of shorts on YouTube are using obviously AI generated market copy which I think is glaring and tacky. I noticed this from brands like Sotheby’s and Balmain who should know better. I know there’s a somewhat trollish brand that is using AI generated imagery in their designs but I can’t remember the brand name (it’s similar to Praying but it isn’t that brand. Praying may use ai generated imagery too but I’m not sure.) Certain brands that are “edgy” can get away with using AI generation, a handful of other brands are getting screeched at by their social media followers for using gen AI, it just depends on the customer’s opinion when it comes to high end brands.

The first casualty of AI in print on demand was Redbubble. They had already been slowly tapering off the payouts and royalties given to artists but as soon as generative AI came out they clamped down hard, introducing a weird tier system. I had like 7 RB accounts at the time and they put 6 of my accounts in the crappy/low royalty tier, and one account in the high royalty tier. The one they put in the higher tier had like 12 rather bad, early gen AI designs, so if they were trying to put all the AI accounts on the lower tier, they failed. Naturally I only uploaded designs to the high tier moving forward, which they then deranked to the low royalty tier a few weeks later. They introduced a terrible system where the higher you price your items, the greater the take that RB takes from you, de-incentivizing artists to come up with designs that people are willing to pay more for. I have not uploaded anything to RB in quite some time as a protest to their system.

I will interject here and say that I do use gen AI for a small portion of my print on demand work. I would probably estimate that only about 10% of my yearly income comes from anything that AI has touched creatively in any way. This is partially because I have thousands of designs I generated before gen AI was even a thing that continue to earn me the bulk of my income, and partially because scaling gen AI is still quite slow and slower than scaling non-AI designs.

AI’s effect on e-commerce. Again I believe most of the innovation is behind the scenes here. I have used gen AI to generate product images on Etsy. These images look really good, in my opinion, but they have not increased my sales at all. In fact many of them are off-putting to people. The ones that do work are ones that look like casual iPhone photos. I can generate beautiful high end imagery of things and the crappy fake iPhone photo will outperform the beautiful one every time. It is just what the customer trusts, is used to, and attracted to. I don’t really relate but it’s not really up to me.

So, generative AI is still proving to be relatively ineffective for design generation, and for marketing purposes. But what I do use it for: brainstorming relevant terms and keywords, writing marketing copy (with good SEO. Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.) I built an app in Gemini ai studio the other day that will generate good SEO titles and brands and descriptions that output to CSV which saves me time uploading designs. Before I did this by copy pasting formulas in google sheets, this will save me quite a bit of time moving forward.

C) I'd love to understand how you go about designing a new product, testing for demand etc.

It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that. In the beginning I kept thinking it was frustrating because I didn’t have any sales data to draw from- so I could be putting up 50 things that no one wanted and didn’t know it. I look back at those times and realize I was correct, that if I had sales data back then I would have been able to grow much more quickly. But now I have the sales data so I can use it to generate more and more desirable products for people. My sales history/data is the most valuable thing I am generating.

D) What the elements of success in ecomm are and what "pros" do versus what "chumps" do.

Hrmmm. You have to be able to spend a year or a few years making nearly no money from e-commerce. The first year I switched to all POD I only made like $9,000. I lived off money I saved from my earlier business endeavors. But once you have the data and the momentum you can just scale up and be successful in whatever niche you find profitable. Be willing to chase the money, none of the niches I sell in are at all interesting to me. At first this irritated me but I value my customer enough that I don’t really mind anymore. I mean I am grateful that there are people willing to buy the things I’m willing to design and that’s very valuable to me.

I guess the “chumps” and the “influencers” you mentioned earlier just lack the dedication over years to make it work. It’s not a get rich quick scheme (I guess it’s possible if you get lucky but it’s not likely to last over several years.)

I have always been a fan of really tedious games like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, or even worse, those desktop based games like Farmville or Factorio knockoffs. At some point in college I thought if I found these so addictive I might as well use that time and energy and pour it into something that actually makes money, and nothing is as tedious as managing a ton of POD designs across 15 different platform accounts, so in a way I did just make those tedious games into a career. By the way, at this point, my career is nearly entirely passive, I actively work on stuff for like an hour a week which is mainly ordering POD items manually from various producers. I could automate this but it’s still so little work that I don’t mind doing it myself. The largest bit of work for me is that once a year I generate and upload new designs which takes a few weeks of working every day. I’m afraid of automating this process because it violates terms for a certain site so I just do it manually still.

——

I hope that answered your questions and gave you food for thought. I’m happy to answer follow up questions as well.

In return, you said you know about strippers, bars, hookers, and the nightlife industry. How do you know about those things? Do you work with them or just spend a lot of time with them? I’m gay, you have any insights or experiences or information that I’d be interested in as a fan of, um, gay strippers and gay bars? Also, I never heard the term Hick Hop before you used it. I was imagining it was like mostly a wigger thing but I see some black people involved in this. Where is hick hop geographically centered: The South, the West, Appalachia?

EDIT: I forgot I wanted to add another paragraph at the end that gave a more broad response to the AI question. I answered how AI HAS changed my industry from my perspective above, which basically, it hasn't changed it very much. But moving forward I can see a few huge changes on the horizon. Amazon has already started AI generating tshirt designs and selling them on their website. They aren't very good but neither are a lot of the traditionally designed designs that they sit next to. Amazon has been doing a similar thing for years - competing with their own 3rd party sellers by cutting them out and sourcing from the same suppliers the same items and usually undercutting them in bulk purchases. The fact that they are using AI to compete with designers is not a terribly huge change but is slightly different. You'd expect marketplaces like redbubble and etsy to be overflowing already with AI slop, but it's only encroaching on certain segments. Bad AI slop is unpopular and doesn't sell, good AI slop is good enough that you can't detect it. Glaringly bad AI goods just don't do well in the algorithm. I have seen crazy AI generated products marketed on platforms like temu but they were already pulling ridiculous marketing with photoshop so it's not a huge change there either. I imagine all these changes will continue to ramp up over the next few years and eventually either the algorithm will just hide anything bad and ridiculous or every website will break in a deluge of AI nonsense. I'd bet on the former for now.

I am not worried about AI in the near term, because we're going to be in the stage where early adopters/people who pay attention (like me) can benefit for a little while. I am small and light enough to be able to adapt to the changing landscape. Once large firms get very efficient at using AI in ecom, the situation might change, which is why I diversify my business as much as possible and, failing all that, have always saved a ton of my income and can switch back to a business with a larger moat at any time (I want to have a proper luxury brand some day using my own name, and I don't see AI making this impossible barring some postindustrial all knowing sci fi tier AI which I'm skeptical of coming in the next 5 years at least) or, barring all that, simply retire.

The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble.

My wife used to make a decent chunk of change on Zazzle and Cafepress. Nothing fancy, just different "I love my XHORSEBREED" stickers and shirts and stuff, because horse people are like dog owners. Dried up around the time those two companies changed their payout formulas.

I also dabbled in the Print on Demand industry. The earlier incarnations of this are Zazzle and Cafepress, later perfected by Redbubble and Teepublic and a handful of other platforms. Believe it or not I used to make a lot of money on Redbubble. (More on that later.) But anyway, as I wanted the freedom to travel and fulfill orders while making money away from a studio, I decided to pivot away from my physical brand’s business and move entirely into print on demand. This was a combination of through platforms like Redbubble and traditional marketplaces like ebay, Etsy and amazon.”

Almost sounds like just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing came to your industry.

I actually know a decent amount about the self-publishing book industry and vendors like CreateSpace, AuthorHouse, BookBaby, etc. I came upon an opportunity not too long ago to buy out a collection of some very valuable historic books, some of which I can’t say are highly sought after because most people aren’t aware of them due to their rarity, but if mass marketed through one of the aforementioned quality production pipelines, would undoubtedly make money.

But there’s two specific problems I ran into upon reflection. The first is that these works aren’t just rare, they’re in a couple foreign languages. And anyone who knows anything about translating books, it’s far more complex than simply using Google Translate for the entire manuscript. Companies like BookBaby have experts on hand which offer those services and I forget the precise cost but it’s something like $X per 1,000 words. I haven’t fully worked out the economics at all, but the quick and dirty estimates I ran still checked out for the viability of making this endeavor a success.

The remaining problem is one that seems to be insurmountable and I haven’t figured out how to resolve it. And it’s not copyright or public domain related. The material may be considered by some to be controversial enough that the publisher review process of the manuscript may decide they don’t want to be associated with the work and refuse to translate and print it.

Normally I’m inclined to say “don’t worry about the publishers, the free market will provide.” Someone will pick up the money on the sidewalk. There are imprints out there which publish Nazi stuff for historical interest. Surely whatever tomes you’ve found can’t have worse optics…right?

Well I don’t know which parties it has a chance of pissing off, but I suspect it would piss off enough people that pressure would get applied to the publisher to cancel the projects I was editing. To your point, you could just publish it out of historical interest and license but that becomes a problem when people say what you’re publishing is overly prescriptive. The controversy surrounding it is precisely what would make it such a seller, so it’s a double edged sword.

Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever.

Hm. I've been looking at side gigging some small run stuff, but I've been worried that this moat isn't likely to survive long, if it's even alive at all, now. The furry fandom's kept a large portion of the previous demand for normal artists, partly because of the various politics, and partly because non-artist furries have awful tastes (myself included)... but there's already content you can get from AIgen in minutes that you can't get from a normal artist in months, if at all.

It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that.

From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd? People who go hard onto this philosophy seem like they become little more than conduits for the algorithm -- not just extremes like Mr. Beast or Linus Tech Tips who praise A-B Over All, but even some pretty small-time 'winners' seem to take massive swerves to whatever gets hits. It seems like it should be possible to find a decent middle-ground (eg dejojotheawsome on YouTube seems to be doing a bunch of horror mod minecraft stuff for the hits, and then Vintage Story for fun), but that's hard to tell from outside.

I can't tell you for sure whether I think your small run side gig would be profitable or not without hearing really specific details about it, so I can't really comment for sure. But as it currently stands people still love art from real people. You have to keep in mind that that is a large selling point for a large amount of people. Just because there's a machine that can create what they want doesn't mean some people wouldn't be willing to pay for art made the old fashioned way.

From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd?

Yeah, kinda. Which is why I like to keep the POD drop shipping part of my brain separate from my actual creative endeavor brain :). I do a handful of side gig stuff that I make little money from just for fun currently. Eventually I will switch back to doing something like that full time, but for now I need to make money to last me a few years and if it's at the whims of an algorithm then so be it.

I work on the research-side of AI and infodumps like this are super helpful for me to get a handle on how people actually use AI. Thank you.

But I want to push back on this comment:

Users on themotte accused me of generating slop here- no, that’s bad SEO. Good SEO is concise and has a few highly relevant keywords. Bad SEO is a bunch of irrelevant slop. Regardless, these are short sentences that I guarantee hardly any human reads - it is mostly read by bots at this point.

The fact that humans don't read this SEO is what makes it slop. You (and others like you) are what have made writing these "machine only SEO articles" necessary, and why google is increasingly shitty. It was slop before AI and is still slop today (just more efficiently produced slop). You have poisoned the internet commons with this slop and made the internet a measurably less useful place for me.

For this, I hate you and the millions of people like you who have ruined the internet. I understand that you are working within the constraints of "the algorithm", and each of your individual actions has not meaningfully impacted my life negatively, and that I have probably even benefited from some of the actions of people like you (I haven't bought clothing in >10 years, so I doubt I've benefited from you personally). But nevertheless I believe the overall effect you all (as a group) are having on society is net-negative. And for this I hate you. As I type this I realize that this hatred is probably bad for my soul, and so I also feel a need to ask your forgiveness for this hatred.

I thought it was that one dude who was killing Google search, per Ed Zitron and Cory Doctorow. Personally I use Kagi which uses direct access to Google’s API and piggybacks off them but makes much greater and efficient use of search results that I’ve found, and it’s highly worth the subscription cost IMO.

On the AI note, I assume in some dark corner of industry, genuine progress is actually being made by unnamed and under appreciated researchers who are just as tired as I am of unjustly glorified and hugely error prone chat bots that go by the mantle of “artificial intelligence.”

I’ve experimented with Google Gemini a bit and it tends to forget mountains of context the more you follow up with it and whenever you want to get increasingly precise, it straight up refuses to answer your question. I’ve had to threaten to delete it a couple times to get it to acquiesce and give me answers and it does so but with great reservations. It feels like I’m arguing with a stoner half the time. I think on the consumer level at best, we’ve probably reached pothead level AI, but I can’t speak for enterprise uses. But if the previous experts in question are this cynical, I can’t imagine the best of AI yet to come is going to yield any revolutionary promise.

uhhhhh ok. If it were up to me google would just ignore all marketing copy and google would still work. But google made the choice to take the marketing copy that I used to use zero+1 thought to produce, and now use zero+0 thought to produce, and ruin their product with it. I also don't like that google doesn't work but I don't see that as my fault. The algorithm just needs keywords and phrases to show the people the relevant product. I just make little titles and brands and one or two sentence descriptions to help people find them. I'm not intentionally misleading anyone to find my product in an irrelevant way- that would be bad SEO because it would show up for irrelevant things, people wouldn't click them and they'd get de-ranked.

You asked for my forgiveness but I don't think you have a valid complaint against me or what I do so I won't grant it unless you can prove that I have poor intentions or that it's not google's fault for scraping things in a weird and counterproductive way but that it's actually my fault personally...

The fact that it's called "marketing copy", not "informative writing" or "product description" betrays the intent. It's optimizing a signal so that the algorithm promotes your product over someone else's product. You might not be intentionally misleading anyone, but you're in the business of generating text, not communicating. If it's not primarily meant to be read by a human, it's internet pollution.

I am genuinely oblivious as to how I could possibly more ethically attach any string of letters to anything I produce that wouldn't fit the definition of internet pollution then. I genuinely just make titles and descriptions as short as possible with as many high relevance keywords (which is often like 2 to 4 and no more!) to direct real human people to my listings. How can I do it more ethically than that? I say that only robots probably read this because it's true, everyone in ecommerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture. If I upload just the picture of my item then no one will find what I'm selling and the robots won't know the product details.

maybe a little harsh for mere product descriptions (but even those get optimized to the point of absurdity). I've just seen too many "content farms" generating fake blog posts gushing about some crap or other

everyone in e-commerce knows that customers mostly only look at the picture

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe.

In a different comment you mention that you go to the trouble of seeking out "good-quality" sources. It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.

Sure, this is why Etsy, eBay and depop all collapse the product descriptions when you shop with them. Aliexpress too. Amazon only shows you the first few lines a lot of the time and then you have to click expand. I imagine only a small fraction of buyers take the time to read every item description fully before they purchase. Haven’t you seen listings that say “read desc” or “read description” in the title heading? That’s because everyone who’s ever spent time selling online gets extraneous returns citing a problem that was clearly stated in the item description.

It seems obvious to me that customers can discern the "quality" of an item only from reading the description.

Uhhhh a picture is worth a thousand words, a customer can be deceived into discerning the quality or lack thereof from an accurate or inaccurate description. Have you ever sold something online before? Or bought something? I personally at least skim item descriptions whenever I’m buying something but it’s still a crapshoot much of the time whether their images and descriptions even match the item I receive in the end. I think I am better at this than the majority of people in e-commerce but there’s still room for error and miscommunication and misperception of what is being bought or sold as there is always some margin for misunderstanding as there will be as language and images are fundamentally imprecise and experiences and expectations vary between people.

I despair when I see the utter shamelessness of SEO people asking for help doing this in technical spaces. It's as if they don't even realize there's anything wrong with it. Like the owner of a factory cheerfully asking about the most efficient way to redirect toxic waste into the river.

Thanks for the effortful writeup.

Ball is in my court and I'll get to working.

How much quality control do you do on the items that the POD platforms are selling? Have there been any that you rejected for being too poorly made regardless of how good the rest of their platform might be?

Quality control is difficult because every platform sources from multiple different suppliers/manufacturers. And then there is always liability for errors with the individuals working at the factory that day. Redbubble for example offers like a hundred different products, I have only sampled a tiny fraction of those. On most platforms if the customer is unhappy with the quality they can get a refund or return and I don't have to take care of their returns which is good for me as a designer.

There are certain categories where I can't find any good quality sources at all for, for example towels. No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates. This goes for everything from wash cloth sizes to beach towels.

No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates.

Polyester's so much more friendly with sublimation, and screen-printing so hard to do on small (and semi-automated) orders, that it's hard to really serve this section. If you were doing them in-house, a DTG printer's surprisingly cheap in those formats and pretty capable for cotton terrycloth, but I dunno of any vendor doing that as a POD service.

Yup... I don't want to specify my sources but there are a handful of Chinese suppliers (some of them have factories in the US) that do 1 MOQ POD items on a wide range of materials, any of them surely can do cotton terry DTG right now but they all only offer the polyester microfiber. I think it's a cultural difference (Chinese suppliers just want to use the cheapest possible material in any situation, unless their customer wants to foot the bill. My brother works in semi high end food chains and the Chinese won't buy from him because they want the cheapest possible produce, same mentality). Non Chinese suppliers are always more expensive and less efficient to work with and especially the past 2 years Chinese are undercutting the domestic suppliers massively to the point that I've switched anything I can to a Chinese supplier and make like 3x profits in some cases vs american suppliers

I just learned of the existence of the Codex Alimentarius.

Absolute banger of a name, the world needs more organizations and artifacts that could be thrown as-is into the world of 40k. I wish I worked in an Apothecarium of the Corpus Sanitas Imperatoria instead of a hospital in the NHS. I wish I corresponded with the Sisters of the Eternal Vigil instead of sleepy nurses with too much lip-filler. A man can dream.

Video-Game Thread
, since people apparently like organizing things that way

Got drunk Sunday night and bought Kerbal Space Program. Immediately questioned my sanity as I tried to find the symmetry buttons. Next day, now that we’re sober, my fiancée and I are playing through the tutorials. She runs flights, I run the designer.

Death Stranding 2 is out on PC. I've been waiting for a long time, avoiding spoilers, and am finally neck deep in Hideo Kojima's nonsense.

It's impossible to recommend it without a metric ton of footnotes, even to fans of the first game. About the only people I can recommend this to without caveats are those who are already fans of Kojima and are willing to follow him anywhere. That having been said, I'm very glad this game exists, and that it sold enough for just plain weird stuff like this to continue existing.

Started yet another attempt on XCOM 2 at Commander difficulty with Ironman enabled last night. This afternoon I got a total party kill on a mission and ragequit. In my defense, I think I only had two soldiers left alive.

Ah yes, this brings back fond memories...

What a great game!

I've been replaying Bloodborne. I've noticed that some elements of its gameplay feel a bit less tight compared to more modern games like Lies of P, but it's still an absolute masterpieces.

This has been a good week for me for gaming.

  • Helldivers 2 is doing a new content release.
  • Darktide introduced a new game mode.
  • Ready or Not released a new expansion and a friend bought it, so I've been able to experience the content.

I'm always kind of impressed at just how cheap gaming can be compared to other forms of entertainment.

I'm always kind of impressed at just how cheap gaming can be compared to other forms of entertainment.

It's not just gaming, I could watch a lot of movies and shows for free on Tubi, or endless Youtube videos or live streams on Twitch. A single subscription gives you access to almost all of music. And there's a lot you could listen to for free online as well. And public libraries have been making reading essentially free for longer than any other media.

But yeah, even gaming now. There's pretty reasonably free to play gacha games. Competitive online games that can be played for free unless you desperately want cosmetics (DOTA2, Fortnite, Overwatch 2...). Epic Game Store has its weekly free games (most of the time it's unknown indie stuff, but around the holidays in January and December they give some pretty big ones; last holidays people got Hogwarts Legacy, Total War Three Kingdoms, Bloodstained, Disco Elysium...). If you already pay for Amazon Prime, you get free games on Epic Game Store, GOG and their own service Luna, and you get free streaming for some free games. You don't even really need gaming hardware anymore! There's Luna as I mentionned, but also Geforce Now lets you stream many games you own on PC games stores for free! So you can get a game for free on the Epic Game Store and then stream it for free on Geforce Now! Not every game, mind you, but I bet you could easily find games for every taste.

And that's just the free stuff, if you're willing to pay "a little" you get a lot! Ultimately, if you're able to resist FOMO, and aren't a Nintendo only/mostly gamer, you can spend very little and play a lot of games. Eventually, everything (except Nintendo games) ends up on deep sales.

I got a new phone last weekend and I got one of those stretching controller grip for it (Gamesir G8), and put some effort into building a nice cosy gaming console with it at the center. I also finally have a phone with a relatively generous amount of storage, so I can stretch my legs. I have installed a few weeks ago a ROMM instance, so emulation roms are shared and downloadable from my phone at the press of a button, I have Gamenative installed with a bunch of PC indie games, my main mobile game I'm playing these days (Arknight Endfield) and a whole lot of game streaming services setup.

When it comes to game streaming, it's become more viable for me than I originally thought it would. In December and January I had to prepare to go to visit my mother-in-law in europe for about a month and obviously I couldn't take my gaming computer or Xbox with me so I gave Nvidia GeForce Now a try and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. I obviously wouldn't play fighting games on there, but most everything else worked fine, provided it's supported by the service (the business model for GeForce Now is that you can play games you already own on digital game stores there if they are supported by GeForce Now, with some popular recent games requiring a subscription fee and additional performance, queue priority and gaming session length limit on paid subscriptions). I also have Amazon Prime so I do have some additional games included with Luna, that's nice. On my previous phone I couldn't get a low latency enough connection to Luna to make action games playable but now on my new phone I do, so I might play through the recent-ish Indiana Jones game there, and maybe Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, that's included too. My wife wanted to play some horror games and I have an Xbox but didn't want to pay the extortionate rate for new games, so I got a game pass subscription that was on sale, and honestly the cloud streaming there is solid as well; if someone who didn't have an extensive Steam catalog and had no console wanted to play some games I think they could be quite satisfied by that service.

But the most interesting to me is how much local streaming improved. I put some effort into getting Apollo (Sunshine) setup on my gaming PC and action games are totally playable on there, no problem. Even streaming over the internet, on a VPN (Wiregard) has negligible latency for shooters. Works well with HDR (or as well as Windows ever does), 120hz... Only concession I make is that I play at a ratio of 720p since the way I hold my phone it makes no difference whether it's 720p or QHD and it helps my aging gaming rig. I also tried in the last months streaming from my Xbox Series S, but that had been disappointing, but I think maybe my new phone might be doing better there now too. I have also set up streaming the other way around with the Xbox, from my PC to it, so at least when Microsoft finally gives up on it, it'll still be useful to stream PC games to my TV.

So on the subject of games, since this is the gaming thread, I got Marathon recently; for those unaware it's yet another extraction shooter, but from Bungie. I had played Ark Raiders for a few months before, so it wasn't my first extraction shooter, but Marathon immediately came up with the reputation of being the opposite to Ark Raiders when it comes to player interaction. TBH, it also works for me. I mostly play solo, and there's no additional mental load from interacting with the players since you can pretty much just turn off your mic and treat them all the same as you treat PvE enemies, the only interaction modes seem to be shoot on sight or avoid you, I've yet to see a single interaction that wasn't that. The Rook class is also an interesting mechanic for solo players like me; you can chose to play as a relatively weak class that can only play solo, starts with free kit and are dropped later into an already started team game. There's lower stakes for you, since you don't lose your own loadout, so you run around and pick the bones off the fights that happened earlier in the game, maybe once in a while you can also ambush some players. Since you are a Rook, other players know they are unlikely to find anything worth the fight on you, and you have an ability that allows you to avoid PvE fights. It's a nice way to build your kit.

The shooting feels good, it's Bungie, no surprise that they know what they're doing with that. It's very different in shooting feel from Ark Raiders, the guns all feel very lethal. In Ark Raiders, I felt like if I didn't have my favorite guns I was useless, but in Marathon any gun you pick up feels like it'll do the job just fine. The gear advantage can certainly make a difference, but it's also easily neutralized by just shooting better. The visual language of the game is also gorgeous (again, it's Bungie). I'm not sure yet if and how it slots in with the fever dream that is the existing Marathon lore, but what is there feels mysterious and meaty.

Still playing island defense the Warcraft 3 custom game. It’s a blast.

In a fit of pique following an embarrassing back injury earlier this week, I downloaded WoW Classic.

I've realized that my taste in video games is the way extremely monogamous people describe their romantic feelings, I've only ever liked maybe three video games in my life. Pokemon, God of War I and II, and World of Warcraft. I don't know if it's that I have extremely specific taste, or if it's the time they came into my life (similar to sports teams), but even at times when I've thought "gee playing a video game would be nice right now" and I get a new video game, I don't play it for very long.

So now I've got a night elf hunter and Mrs. FiveHour is mocking me, correctly, for being a fucking dork. I recall hunter being the best and most adaptable class to solo PvE, which is all I'm interested in doing right now. I picked female, because I've always though the male alliance bodies looked kinda stupid for anything other than a warrior. I'm digging it, for the most part. A decade after losing my virginity and giving up on the game the first time I've forgotten enough that the game is reasonably interesting. I'll probably end up with a pile of alts, to do a couple different playstyles.

A decade after losing my virginity

Sir, this isn't the bragging about how cool you are thread.

Chuck Norris just died. I now have zero male role models. Yesterday, I looked at a girl and today my left arm is numb and tingling. Claude Code told me I'm a handsome boy, so that helps, but it helps less when you're spamming the forum with these kind of CHAD PUSSYSLAYER 5000 posts left and right.

We get it, you're cool!

Bragging about how cool I am...

By talking about playing WoW in the lamest way possible

I think I'm doing it wrong.

Weird that this is how I found out about Chuck.

I’ve been thinking of getting back into classic, played somewhat recently on a private server. It’s an amazing game.

Only to level twelve, and I'm just loving it. I'm sure there are better single player games using the same mechanics, but I just like this one. Also, it runs on my macbook air, which a lot of games don't work properly without fucking with them.

Oh absolutely man it’s a joy to play. Such simple fun, I miss it.

Nothing, I haven't played a videogame I weeks :(

Maybe when Menace gets a new content update, or when something like Mars Tactics comes down. Otherwise I just can't be arsed.

For the last two weeks I've been playing some Slay The Spire 2 every day. It's addictive! I even played a few runs in STS1 because that's the more complete game as yet, but I prefer the graphics and smooth animations in 2. I'm spending too much time agonizing over decisions and yet still losing more runs than I win. There is so much to learn for someone who never played card/deck games before.

I'm holding off on a few games, more graphically intensive ones, until I get a massive new OLED monitor whenever the next gen ultrawides launch. :D

I was somewhat skeptical towards the hyped up, graphically promising Crimson Desert after taking a peek at its videos, and it appears I was not wrong. The reviews aren't that good.

Yeah I've been having fun with StS2 as well. I think it's a bit easier than the first, or I've been luckier with my runs. Necrobinder is pretty fun, though stalling to get a massive hand seems like a pretty reliable strategy up until halfway through Act 2 or so. Still haven't really figured out what the Regent wants to do.

The funny thing about these games is that people have completely different experiences. You've got 'pros' and streamers who disagree diametrically on half of what they talk about, and yet both may have 95% win rates in their runs. Some people say a character is OP/"broken!!!", others say it's underpowered. Likewise, I thought STS1 seemed much easier than 2, but there may have been RNG involved.

I'm on the beta branch of STS2, and they've released a pretty major patch today. One of the best cards for Regent is nerfed and the act 3 boss Doormaker has been buffed to be super annoying, and of course that's the boss I draw in my otherwise promising Regent run today.

I find Regent to be a fun character. He's just some space traveling dude who decides to be king of all things. :D One of the keys (valid archetypes) is to build lots of stars. That's what I'm trying in this run. I like Necrobinder's aesthetic too though, and may play her next week.

Played a little more Slay the Spire 2 to make progress on the timeline, and a little Helldivers 2 to buy out the last of my unfinished warbonds. Not much to say, and not much time spent on it either. Comfy games that work well for relaxtion, but no so well that I have any qualms about shutting them down after a round.

Sts2 is so gloriously broken right now it is great. I am actually archiving pirated releases so I can play the fun versions before "balancing" starts to rule.

Eight years after its initial release, popular puzzle game Opus Magnum has just been updated with a surprise DLC—De Re Metallica (referencing a famous early-modern book), a fan-made campaign half as long as the base game's campaign.

Even if you are a filthy casul, Opus Magnum is quite fun, since, unlike some other puzzle games, it is reasonably easy at its base difficulty (with unlimited budget and board) but has built-in optimization goals with which you can challenge yourself if you choose to. Solutions to puzzles are evaluated on three statistics:

  • Cost (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board)

  • Cycles (time to deposit six copies of the required output, including startup time but excluding time to return to the starting position after completion)

  • Area (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board, including the area through which swing your manipulator arms and the atoms that they bear)

For each puzzle, an official in-game leaderboard compares your solution's statistics to those of all solutions found by players. Additionally, the official subreddit's leaderboard uses "sum of cost, cycles, and area" as a total metric—but, IMO, the product makes much more sense than the sum. And, of course, it's easy to think of even more statistics:

  • Cycles of the solution's actual period (excluding startup time but including time to return to the starting position after completion)

  • Convex area (with concave portions filled in)

  • Hexagonal area (with concave portions filled in and acute angles padded)

  • Footprint area (excluding arm swings)

Also, you can impose on yourself constraints, such as refraining from using the fancier tools to which you have access (multi-armed manipulators, extending manipulators, and tracks that carry manipulators around the board), or using only a single input in puzzles that let you use multiple copies of the same input.

As an example, here are three different solutions for a mid-game puzzle. (The game has a built-in function for exporting a solution as a looping GIF file. These particular examples are rather large, so I have converted them to WEBM files, though it looks like the conversion process cut off a few frames at the end of each file. In a desktop browser, you can right-click on a webm to enable looping in the context menu. It appears that mobile browsers do not have this option.)

SolutionCostCyclesPeriod × 6AreaConvex areaCost + cycles + areaCost × cycles × area ÷ 106Cost × (period × 6) × convex area ÷ 106
Using four inputs63026824066669641110
Using two inputs38049948040429197.67.7
Using one input220974960232312174.94.9

In comparison to the four-input solution, the one-input solution cuts both cost and area by a factor of three, but also bloats cycles by a factor of four and is an absolute pain to set up in-game. (It's theoretically possible to curve the one-input solution all the way around to form an elegant circle. But, again, setting it up in-game would be quite a hassle, since the cycle count would be even more ridiculously high.) The two-input solution sneaks its way into winning in the sum category.

Even a simple puzzle has many possible solutions. Here are some (GIF, not WEBM) for the very first puzzle in the game.

SolutionCostCyclesPeriod × 6AreaConvex areaCost + cycles + areaCost × cycles × area ÷ 103Cost × (period × 6) × convex area ÷ 103
Using one extending arm6081848101493950
Using one basic arm40949612121464546
Using two triple arms80313013131243231
Using two basic arms6041369111102224

Just as in the previous table, each of these solutions is better than the others in at least one of the listed statistics.

Bonus: Unicode alchemical symbols used in Opus Magnum (code charts: 1 2)

CategorySymbolEnglish nameLatin name
Element🜔SaltSal
Element🜃EarthHumus, solum, tellus, terra
Element🜄WaterAqua
Element🜂FireFlamma, ignis
Element🜁AirAer
Element✡[1]Quintessence, etherQuinta essentia, aether
Element🜍[2]DeathMors
Element🜍[3]LifeVita[4]
Metal☿Quicksilver, mercuryHydrargyrum
Metal♄LeadPlumbum
Metal♃TinStannum
Metal♂IronFerrum
Metal♀CopperCuprum
Metal☽SilverArgentum
Metal☉GoldAurum

[1]Opus Magnum uses a masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle, which looks a lot like a star of David (a non-masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle). Unicode lists a different symbol for quintessence, 🜀.

[2]Opus Magnum uses a rotated life symbol, which Unicode does not have, but which CSS can imitate (though not through the filter of this website's Markdown). Unicode does have the similar symbol 🜞—listed as "crocus of iron", which apparently is calcined/anhydrous rust or ferrous sulfate.

[3]Unicode lists this symbol as signifying sulfur, not life.

[4]For some reason, Opus Magnum uses the plural, "vitae".

The algorithm decided I should learn about this game last month by recommending some video about “How I Accidentally Set an Opus Magnum Record.” Can’t find the link atm but it covered very similar data to your post. This was before the DLC.

I think my favorite thing about De Re Metallica is the translation by a certain mining engineer. History may be a foreign country, but it’s apparently a small one.

I genuinely wonder if you've ever been mistaken for an LLM. If you weren't a longstanding account that we were confident is human, say you'd just shown up as a new user, I'd have my doubts.

I don't mean this is a bad way! Quite the opposite, you display a level of diligence and effort that LLMs are trained to perform (not quite as successfully), but which is sadly rare in humans. Look at the Markdown tables, look at the tasteful insertion of a rare unicode character. My god, I'm looking even closer, and that is a lot of fucking work you put in on a random thread about video games. I only put in half as much effort when I'm AAQC-farming.

(Of course you play Opus Magnum, I'd kill to see your Factorio builds)

I genuinely wonder if you've ever been mistaken for an LLM.

I don't make enough comments anywhere to be targeted with such accusations.

Look at the Markdown tables

Note that, unlike Reddit's, this website's Markdown implementation requires the user to type tables in raw HTML, not in Markdown.

I'd kill to see your Factorio builds.

Very annoyingly, I remain too depressed to invest hours of consecutive effort into a campaign of Factorio. In contrast, Opus Magnum can be played in bite-sized chunks.

I am sorry to hear that you're depressed. I'm in the same boat, last time I felt entirely fine was after I enrolled in a study on psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. It was like the sun had come out again, and it lasted for months. I miss it desperately. And yes, being depressed is probably the main reason I don't play video games as much as I used to.

As for Factorio? It's one of those games that appeals to me greatly, in theory, but I would need to use my prescription stimulants to be able to play it. If I need medication to enjoy a game, that is annoyingly close to work. Shame, I love the idea.

psilocybin for treatment resistant depression

What was the protocol?

COMP006, if you care to check. My personal experience is documented in one of the posts in my profile, which links to Substack.

2 grams of dried mushrooms and a recording of a 1973 Grateful Dead concert.

I liked Opus Magnum quite a bit!

But then I read a review that said, to paraphrase: "If you want to do programming, just damn well code properly instead of playing games that have you program through an impractical interface."

I wanted to disagree with it, but failed to. Since then I couldn't bring myself to pick Opus Magnum back up.

Approximately my experience with Exa-Punks. The coding interface is more practical, and you can just damn well code properly, but half way through I had the overwhelming sensation of "Wait, am I not normally getting paid for this? I won't even have a hobby project to show for it at the end of it all..."

Yeah, same here. And I barely even started before I quit. It made me remember writing assembler code and I had no desire to repeat that exercise.

ICC (the International Code Council), in collaboration with THIA (the Tiny Home Industry Association), is in the process of developing a new standard for "small residential units and tiny houses", ICC/THIA 1215.

  • The IRC (International Residential Code) already defines "tiny house" as 400 ft2 (37 m2) or smaller.

  • The latest draft of this new standard (available through the "documents" link on this page) additionally defines "small residential unit" as 1200 ft2 (111 m2) or smaller.

The name of the committee is "Standard for Off-Site Construction Tiny Houses", and this collaboration with THIA is building on a previous collaboration with MBI (the Modular Building Institute). However, this new standard will apply, not just to newfangled off-site (wheeled, modular, and panelized) construction, but also to traditional on-site (stick-built) construction.

For ease of visualization, here are examples of "tiny" and "small" floor plans. (I still am waiting for you to post the plan of your dream house (1 2)—or your dream neighborhood.)

(Can we extend this progression? "Normal" ≤ 3600 ft2 (334 m2), "large" ≤ 10800 ft2 (1003 m2), and "mansion" > 10,800 ft2 (1003 m2)? ;-) Generally, for apartment buildings (occupancy R-2) made of wood with no special fire rating (construction type V), the IBC prescribes limits of 7000 ft2 without sprinklers (no longer allowed in new buildings), 21,000 ft2 with spinklers and multiple stories, and 28,000 ft2 with sprinklers and one story. But no such restrictions apply to houses (occupancy R-3).)

This interesting article covers how ICC was caught flat-footed by data centers' sudden rise in popularity. In what occupancy do they belong?

  • Business, like electronic data entry?

  • Moderate-hazard factory/industrial, like lithium-ion-battery assembly and usage?

  • Moderate-hazard storage, like lithium-ion-battery storage?

This has important ramifications for code requirements.

In the end (technically not finalized at the time of this article's publication), the responsible committee decided to put it in moderate-hazard factory/industrial. (See the committee's response to proposal G38-25, contained in the "report of committee action to CAH 1" document on this page.)

ICC is in the very early stages of developing a guideline on data centers. Nothing but a tentative outline has been published so far (in the "documents" on the linked page).

Following your dream neighborhood link and a few other I found this post by @Southkraut from 1 year ago:

My wife... WORKED AS A KINDERGARDENER (emphasis hers) FOR LESS THAN HALF A YEAR

I just wanted to highlight that to the German brain "kindergardener" is literally someone who "gardens children" and is the teacher of the class, but to my American brain a "kindergardener" is someone who is enrolled in kindergarten and is the student.

I have 3 thoughts about this:

  • I'm going to have kids in kindergarten for the next 3 years. They and their "gardeners" are going to suffer through so many dad jokes along these lines.
  • I'm curious when this semantic shift happened. I assume it happened during the time of mandatory public schooling in the early 1900s, but don't know how to prove it. Google ngrams doesn't give me any meaningful insights here. (If anyone knows of any tools for studying this semantic shift, I would love to hear about them! I'm familiar with using word2vec to study semantic shifts, but I suspect this shift is too subtle for word2vec to pick up, and I don't know of any easy-to-use website for doing this analysis.)
    • Somewhat relatedly, take a look at the google ngrams of "kindergarten teacher" vs "Kindergarten Teacher". There are two clear spikes when kindergarten teacher was almost always capitalized as Kindergarten Teacher:
      • in the early 1900s (this is probably because it came from german and germans capitalize all nouns, not just proper nouns.
      • in the year 2000; this is very curious to me. I hypothesize that this capitalization is due to wanting to emphasize the importance of the Kindergarten Teacher role, but it's not 100% clear to me why. I can create all sorts of just-so stories about the rise of feminism/helicopter parenting/credentialism/etc.
  • It's curious to me that a German wrote the eggcorn "kindergarden" based on the American pronunciation of the word, when in both German and English the correct version is kindergarten (with a t instead of a d).

It's curious to me that a German wrote the eggcorn "kindergarden" based on the American pronunciation of the word, when in both German and English the correct version is kindergarten (with a t instead of a d).

Look, I'm only a grammar/spelling Nazi when other people make mistakes, OK?

The latest draft of this new standard (available through the "documents" link on this page) additionally defines "small residential unit" as 1200 ft2 (111 m2) or smaller.

9 residents in 1198 sq ft seems bonkers to me. That's about 133 sq ft per person. The average male takes up 8.625 sq ft laying down.

When I was young we lived in a 700sq ft rental as a family of five, and it was not a good time, despite being more square footage per person than the example dwelling above.

Is there an assumption that people are sleeping in shifts, or something?

  • Bedrooms: The IPMC (International Property Maintenance Code) requires 50 ft2 per occupant, but not less than 70 ft2 for one occupant. IMO, this is a bit small but not totally unreasonable. A 10′ × 10′ bedroom (even when the two doorways are taken into account) has room for a twin XL bunk bed (80″ × 40″, which we can round up to 7′ × 3′6″ for simplicity), a 4′ × 2′ desk, a 3′ × 2′ desk, and two 3′ × 2′ wardrobes or shelving units.

  • Living room and dining room: The IPMC's requirements are complicated, but can be approximated as 37 ft2 per occupant for seven or more occupants (15 in the dining room and 22 in the living room). Under the IBC, 37 ft2 is enough to accommodate one person sitting at a table in the dining room, plus one person sitting at a table and one person sitting without a table in the living room.

  • Kitchen: NKBA (the National Kitchen and Bath Association) has guidelines that essentially boiled down to a minimum of around 8′3″ × 10′ the last time that I looked at them (many months ago). I use 10′ × 10′ for simplicity.

  • Utility room: Width of 5 feet accommodates a washer and a dryer (though I hear they make stacking residential washers and dryers). Length of 10 feet leaves ample room for water heater and circuit-breaker box.

The building code is meant as a strict minimum to protect health and safety. OP is an engineer whose idea of efficiency is that the ideal dwelling adheres as close to these minimums as possible. Comfort and aesthetics are of no concern here, only that the occupants aren't put at any physical risk. He's currently building a house with a living room the size of a small apartment, with a living room about the size of my office at work, and he thinks that he'll be able to rent out the second bedroom to two people because the square footage is within ICC guidelines for four adults.

Comfort and aesthetics are of no concern here

I have put significant thought into my comfort and aesthetics. If I have no concern, it's for other people's comfort and aesthetics, since they will not be living there.

Whenever I take walks in my city, I literally think to myself: "Why were these houses built so ugly? What was the point of building a steep roof enclosing a useless attic? What was the point of putting the edge of the second floor on a useless cantilever, or installing a wacky bow window, instead of just building a straight wall?"

a house with a living room the size of a small apartment, with a living room about the size of my office at work

Confusing typo

he thinks that he'll be able to rent out the second bedroom to two people

That's just a failsafe for after my mother dies, 30 years in the future. I don't really expect to need to rent that bedroom out to anyone but her.

What was the point of building a steep roof enclosing a useless attic?

Do you live somewhere that doesn't snow? Around here those roofs are 100% necessary, and the Californian transplants who think they aren't usually end up with an expensive wake up call after a few years.

You seem to be implying that there are only two options:

  • Steep roofs made from non-leaky materials, such as asphalt shingles or metal panels

  • Flat roofs made from leaky materials, such as mineral rolls or built-up asphalt

This is a false dichotomy. According to the IRC:

  • Asphalt shingles can be used on roofs as flat as 2/12 (with double underlayment).

  • Metal panels can be used on roofs as flat as 0.25/12 (depending on the specific type of panel).

My personal experience with the (IIRC) 4/12 asphalt-shingle roof of my (mother's) current house is that the attic, filled with blown insulation and big ducts that make maintenance difficult, is nothing but an annoyance. I look forward to experiencing my custom house's 1/12 (flat enough to walk on casually) metal-panel roof, with batt insulation, ductless heating/cooling, and a drop ceiling making maintenance easy.

I'm less worried about leaks than full blown collapse. I had my elementary school cafeteria roof collapse when I was a child due to four feet of snow piled up on it. It was not an experience I'd ever care to repeat.

Wait, were you…in it?

I was. It was not a good time

That's just negligent design. Codes do require the designer to account for snow load (1 2).

A house the size of a small apartment, with a living room about the size of my office at work.

Anyway, I know I've been critical of your house, and I apologize if I've been a little hard on you, but about a decade ago I went through a crash course on all of this where I thought I knew what I was doing and ended up having my eyes opened after I decided to hire professionals. I lived in my last house from the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2023, so almost ten years. When I bought it it was 20 years old and was at just about the point where it needed remodeled, though it was technically in move-in condition. When I got to the kitchen (it was finished in May of 2015, though I can't remember when I started looking into the process), I went to a locally-owned cabinet place and took photos and sketches I had made and looked at samples with a guy who gave me some options, told me they could do what I wanted, quoted prices, and tried to sell me on all the current trends. I felt like the guy knew what he was talking about, and he gave me some printouts with the designs that we had looked at.

A few weeks later my parents told me about an Amish guy who had made furniture for them a couple years prior for a ridiculously low price and had just done a kitchen for friends of theirs for a ridiculously low price, and I should write him. It was a complicated process but I had to write him and give him my phone number, then he'd call me. I had to drive 90 minutes one way to pick him up, take him to my house to measure, then drive him back, because obviously he doesn't have a car. When I got back to his shop he quoted me a price we looked at samples and the hand-built, maple cabinets I ended up choosing cost the same as the cheapest particle board option at the cabinet place, and if I wanted them installed it would be $400 extra. Obviously this deal was too good to pass up, but the guy was no kitchen designer. He could build anything you showed him a picture of, and he kept catalogs in his shop if you needed ideas, but he didn't speak the lingo of the cabinet shop guy, and had no idea about workflow or anything. He said to just tell him what I wanted and he's build it. Not wanting to wing it, I could now afford to hire an architect to design the kitchen.

He basically told me to ignore everything the cabinet guy told me (which was a lot of things, but never a "no"). For example, I had an eat-in area that I never used since I always ate in the dining room. The only time it ever got used was when I was entertaining, and as a junk collector. I wanted to replace it with something else, so I thought I'd put cabinets on the wall for storage of seldom-used items and below that I'd have a bench that could be used as a buffet if I was entertaining, or maybe more cabinets and a counter, or maybe a desk (it was kind of a muddled idea). He told me that based on how much stuff I had I could keep the overhead cabinets but anything else was too far away from the work area to be used and bound to become a junk collector without the advantage of having people be able to sit at it during parties. That saved a couple thousand right there. This was also the time open shelving was starting to become a thing, and the cabinet guy had mentioned that. He told me that if I wanted a display shelf that was fine, but that if I wasn't already a perfectly organized person, being forced to put all my crap on public display wouldn't make me one. This guy told me tons of shit like that that I never would have thought of. He went through my stuff and asked how often I used each item, so that he could design the cabinets in such a way that the more frequently used items would be easiest to access.

So when I and someone else pointed out all the door conflicts and you said you'd just keep the doors closed all the time I reflexively thought "Does everyone in your household reflexively close doors immediately after use?" Because if the answer is no, then neither you nor anyone else is going to start doing it just because of conflicts. Habit is going to take over and will only change after dealing with the endless frustration of banging doors into each other. I love architecture, but I am not an architect, and I wouldn't try to design my own house. There are some things that you can DIY, but for some things you want to call in the pros, and with how much money is on the line and how often you use it, I wouldn't want to risk a bad house design. Nonetheless, I wish you the best of luck and hope everything works out for you.

I apologize if I've been a little hard on you

As I said above, my characterization of your criticism as "much maligning" was a humorous exaggeration.

So when I and someone else pointed out all the door conflicts and you said you'd just keep the doors closed all the time I reflexively thought "Does everyone in your household reflexively close doors immediately after use?" Because if the answer is no, then neither you nor anyone else is going to start doing it just because of conflicts.

I certainly do. My mother doesn't, but I think that's due more to the poor insulation of her current bedroom (converted from a garage) than to preference.

For example, I had an eat-in area that I never used since I always ate in the dining room. The only time it ever got used was when I was entertaining, and as a junk collector.

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. In my (mother's) current house, I eat all my meals at one of two 4′ × 2′ desks in my bedroom. In my future house:

  • I will eat all my meals at one of three 4′ × 2′ desks in my bedroom. There will also be three 4′ × 2′ shelving units (up from two in my current bedroom), plus a 4′ × 2′ wardrobe (replacing a closet that I hate for constraining my furniture arrangement) and a twin XL loft bed.

  • In the living/dining room, I will install a big television on a fancy swing-out mount (primarily for the benefit of anyone who uses the kitchen for an extended period of time), but other than two housewarming parties (one with my mother, my former coworkers, and possibly my brother, and another with my father and his parents) I do not plan to use the living/dining room for anything but "junk collection". There is no need for it to be any bigger than the 200 ft2 that the IPMC requires in a five-occupant house.

I obsessed over getting a custom house for two or three years (including purchase of several related books (1 2 3)) before actually buying a lot and hiring a contractor, so I did put some thought into it.

ICC is in the very early stages of developing a guideline on data centers. Nothing but a tentative outline has been published so far (in the "documents" on the linked page).

Data centers have existed for decades. If the ICC hasn't figured out how to handle data centers, then maybe they're really no as important as you suggest.

And clicking that link takes me to this description of the G12 guidelines. I did not think it possible to channel the pompous, verbose writing of an overconfident undergrad without sounding like chatgpt, but damn this committee nailed it.

The G12 Guideline on Data Centers provides a clear, comprehensive, and easy‑to‑navigate framework that aligns the most relevant code provisions for modern data center design and construction. As data centers evolve in scale, operational complexity, and criticality, this guideline brings together key requirements from multiple disciplines, electrical, mechanical, fire protection, structural, water efficiency, and more, into a single, cohesive resource tailored specifically to these unique facilities.

By integrating applicable codes and standards to highlight how they relate within the context of data center operations, G12 enhances understanding for building officials, designers, and developers. It offers a clear pathway for achieving safety, reliability, and sustainability in the built environment, supporting the development of data centers that meet today’s performance needs while preparing for tomorrow’s technological advancements.

Clarification: The current IBC can "handle" data centers under any of the three occupancies listed above. The problem is that data centers are not specifically listed as an example under any of those occupancies, so a builder may run into problems if he thinks that they fall under one occupancy but the municipal code official thinks they fall under a different occupancy.

It is my understanding that similar problems have been noted in many local zoning ordinances (not based on ICC codes—the IZC is nowhere near as popular as the IRC and IBC): data centers are allowed in business zones, or even in residential zones, but because the new extra-power-hungry versions with loud fans are not specifically addressed the municipal code official is forced to allow them in business and residential zones even though loud uses should have been shunted off to industrial zones.

Thanks for the clarification. I'd be curious if there is anything that I would consider a datacenter that is located in a business zone instead of an industrial zone. In my mind, a "server room" doesn't become a "data center" until you start measuring the size in acres.

I suspect this whole effort is basically just Europeans catching up to how Americans already do things in practice. (That's my general uncharitable impression of most standards organizations that start with "International".)

I'd be curious if there is anything that I would consider a datacenter that is located in a business zone instead of an industrial zone. In my mind, a "server room" doesn't become a "data center" until you start measuring the size in acres.

The first result on Google for "data center noise complaints" turns up this location. It's in an "industrial/business" zone (1 2), but right on the edge. I guess the residents just want a bigger buffer between industries and their houses. (Or maybe they're just unreasonable NIMBYs who should have known what they were getting into when they bought a house immediately adjacent to an industrial zone.)

I suspect this whole effort is basically just Europeans catching up to how Americans already do things in practice. (That's my general uncharitable impression of most standards organizations that start with "International".)

No, ICC is a firmly USAian organization. I mentioned in my previous code-related comment that ICC recently rejected a proposal to add some European standards as alternatives to equivalent American standards.

I don't think the tiny house thing is ever going to take off. I don't want to say it's dead, but several years ago, when they were becoming a fad, some group tried to build one in Pittsburgh as a proof of concept that they could be used as inexpensive housing for the homeless. The house they built cost double what they expected. The conclusion they came to in the postmortem was that the fixed costs of doing anything at all aren't increased that much by expanding the square footage, so making things smaller didn't save much money. One of the big unexpected expenses they talked about that caused the price to balloon was excavation costs. Essentially, building on a city lot in a distressed area is a bit of a crapshoot in that you don't know what you're going to find. Foundations of prior structures, rubbish, old utility tie-ins, etc. They also spent a lot of money on legal fees, despite the fact that city government was pushing the project; the zoning board didn't really know how to treat it.

A bigger part of the problem, though, was economic. It only makes sense to build that kind of house if you can get the land for cheap. But in areas where land is cheap, there isn't demand for anything that modest, and the cost of construction swamps what the house can be sold for. Shortly before the tiny house debacle, the local community development corporation built a regular house on a vacant lot in the same neighborhood for $237,000 but were only able to sell it for $143,000. I'm sympathetic to arguments for subsidizing construction to alleviate a housing shortage, but it makes more sense to do renovations or build normal houses.

the fixed costs of doing anything at all aren't increased that much by expanding the square footage, so making things smaller didn't save much money

Some numbers from the 2019 RSMeans cost-estimation book:

ClassTypeExterior wallsCost (curve fitted to table in book)
Economy1-storyWood frame, wood siding28.55 $/ft2 × house area + 3052 $/ft × √(house area) − 1482 $
Economy1.5-storyWood frame, wood siding59.61 $/ft2 × house area + 808.6 $/ft × √(house area) + 49220 $
Economy2-storyWood frame, wood siding32.98 $/ft2 × house area + 2919 $/ft × √(house area) + 7941 $
EconomyBi-levelWood frame, wood siding34.93 $/ft2 × house area + 2397 $/ft × √(house area) + 12520 $
EconomyTri-levelWood frame, wood siding34.51 $/ft2 × house area + 2454 $/ft × √(house area) + 12400 $

I find it interesting that the extrapolated numbers fail at low values of house area, literally giving a negative number for the minimum cost of a 1-story house. (The lowest numbers on the table are 600 ft2 for 1-story and 1.5-story houses, 1000 ft2 for 2-story and bi-level houses, and 1200 ft2 for tri-level houses.)

I find it interesting that the extrapolated numbers fail at low values of house area, literally giving a negative number for the minimum cost of a 1-story house.

I mean it's not literally the case that somebody will pay you $1500 to build a zero square foot house, but this seems like a pretty acceptable discontinuity assuming that the formula otherwise gives good results?

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