I’ve pumped at least a few hours into at least 90% of the games I own, gave each entry a fair shake, and either moved on or come back to it now and again. Its the rare exception that the game is so up my alley I can pour endless hours into it without the experience getting boring.

I don’t care about achievements or even completing it. I play games mainly to try out a new experience and get the brain working in different ways. Some of my favorite games I can pump many hours into and have completed, rougelikes especially are infinitely replayable. But others are once and done experiences I got my fill of over the course of a couple of hours and have no desire to come back to. Theres no shame in being the later.

I always wondered why Alien UFOs wouldn’t hide in plain sight as an airplane except for the fact that the blinking lights would surely alert air control that an unregistered plane was in air space right? But I dunno its an interesting idea and your story kind of aligns with the concept

What is ‘the internet’ to you? I think this term means different things to different people. I imagine to people born in the latest generations the internet is social media and productivity corpo sites. To them the internet is youtube, tiktok, twitter, reddit, their bank, and whatever slop services they subscribe to magically beamed into pocket computer through technomagical nerd shit like “5g” and processed through “microprocessors” and other stuff they’ dont care to really understand because its all abstracted away.

I was born early enough for the internet to be nothing more than two computers barely powerful enough to run a GUI calling eachother up through telephone wires to share goofy web 1.0 blogspam. I remember when low res images were the norm and when pre-google youtube was just coming into being. When AOL and Myspace and Newgrounds/flash games. I remember being a kid and loving computers because I never knew what new cool website was on the horizon to discover and play with. I remember that people used things like newsgroups and pre-craigslist to meet up for transactions.

This is the internet, to me. At least what it once was and what it can be again. People using the digital landscape to freely express themselves with their own hardware. To come together to share in hobbies and interest and passions.

We could have that again if we all bought into a standardized radio based mesh network that could host personal sites while acting as a routing node.

But I don’t know if the general public will ever be pushed to partake in this network. They would have to be squeezed very hard to try alternatives to the common way of things.

gboard

If you haven’t considered it already, please consider switching to a open source keyboard that doesn’t collect all your typing data like heliboard

Its more related to limits of knowability of events beyond a certain scale. Its easy an intuitive to think of it like spacetime is quantized like pixels on a grid with a minimum action requirement of time and energy to move between them. But its not that simple or at least that kind of granular discreteness is not proven (though there are digital physics frameworks that treat spacetime discrete like this)

The Planck length does not define the minimum distance something can move but rather the minimum scale of meaningful measurement that can make a bit of distinction between two microsstates of information. In essence it says that if theres two continuous computational paths that differ by less than a sub-plancks worth of distinction there is no measurable distinction difference between them and the paths get blurred together.

Its a precision limit that defines how exact we can measure interactions that happen within the distance between two points.

It’s possible that spacetime is continuous at a fundamental level, but the Planck length represents the scale at which quantum fluctuations of spacetime itself become so violent that the concepts of a ‘path’ or a ‘distance’ can no longer be defined in the classical sense, effectively creating discrete quantized limits for measurement precision.

Ultimately this precision bound limit is related to energy cost to actualize a measurement from a superposition and the exponetial increase in energy needed to overcome uncertainty principle at smaller and smaller scales. The energy required to actualize a meaningful state from a sub-planck length would be enough to create a kugelblitz black hole made from pure condensed energy.

This same logic applies to time, giving us the Planck time, the shortest meaningful interval. So, in a way, the Planck scale does define a fundamental limit on the ‘speed’ at which distinguishable events can occur.

Is the speed of causation propagation linked to plank length?

Yes, more specifically the Planck length is derived from an equation involving the speed of light/causality.

Where C is light, h is reduced planck constant, and G is gravitational constant. Together they tell us the fundamental unit length of meaningful distinction, a very important yard stick for measuring the smallest distances.

I have no religious beliefs. The thing that trips me up is how is there matter in the first place if none can ever be created? Why was there stuff at a single point at some time

The “matter/information can’t be created or destroyed” thing only applies to closed systems within their own operational bounds. It’s about logical consistency within a closed set, but that tells us nothing about where the closed set itself came from. All the energy from the big bang/first universal iteration was loaned from somewhere else. The how and why of this is probably going to remain a mystery forever because our simulations of the laws of physics can’t go back to before the big bang.

So the nature of the big bang and why anything exists is one of the big open-ended philosophy-of-science questions that there isn’t an easy falsifiable answer to. It’s up to interpretation. I have my own theories on the topic but any guess is as good as another.

From the good old classic “Because God Did It™” to “bubble universes that foam out from a hyperdimensional substrate with random laws of physics/math that sometimes allow for observation and life” and everything in between. It’s all the same to me because we can’t prove anything one way or the other.

What your asking directly stems from two related open ended philosophy-of-science questions. These would be " Are universal constants actually constant?" and “Does the speed of light differ in speed at any point of time in its journey between two points of space in a continuous substrate?”

The answer to both like all philosophy questions is a long hit on the pot pipe and a “sure man, its possible but remains unlikely/over engineering the problem until we have justification through observing it” however I’ll give my two cents.

“” Are universal constants actually constant?" " it probably depends on the constant. Fundamental math stuff that tie directly into computations logic and uncertainty precision limits like pi are eternal and unchanging. More physics type constants derived from statistical distribution like the cosmological constant might shift around a little especially at quantum precision error scales.

The speed of light probably is closer to the first one as its ultimately about mathematically derived logical boundaries on how fast any two points universe can interact to quantize a microstate. Its a computational limit and I don’t see that changing unless the actual vaccum substrate of spacetime takes a sudden phase shift.

“Does the speed of light differ in speed at any point of time in its journey between two points of space in a continuous substrate?”

Veritasium did a good video about this one. The answer is its possible but currently unmeasurable . so if all hypothesis generate the same effective results then the simplest among them (light maintaining a constant speed during both ways of trip) is the most simple computationally efficient hypothesis among them.

Do you really believe that in all of eternity, we happen to be just four and a half billion years in? We are probably on our infinite life, and have infinite more to go. Just completely random lives, no idea where we will end up, nothing persists.

Yes I do, though must clarify its the earth that is estimated 4.5 billion. the universe itself is currently estimated at 13.8 billion years since big bang.

There’s a difference between the philosophical idea of an eternal process of cosmological rebirth, and the experimentally observed behaviors of the current universe we live in captured with our most powerful instruments and our best mathematical models.

In the 20th century we built telescopes powerful enough to see into the very distant universe and track the movement of galaxies. Because of this technological achievement we observed some strange things.

First was that galaxies seemed to be moving further and further away from each other. Not only that, they were moving away at an accelerating pace. This uncovered the idea of cosmological expansion, that over time our universe “spreads out” and creates new space between already distant objects.

Second, because the speed of light is finite, this creates fundamental limits to how far we can observe (the cosmological horizon) and a crazy cool phenomenon where the further you look into the distant universe the further back in time you look due to the age of the light from the star and the distance it traveled. We can literally see how the universe looked billions of years ago and calculate how far back we are looking.

If you look back far enough with extremely low frequency radio telescopes you can map out the thermal radiation from when the universe was extremely hot and dense about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This is called the Cosmic Microwave Background. It shows the universe was in a very condensed high energy state.

Third, we have concepts such as the second law of thermodynamics that says entropy increases in closed systems. Energy always spreads out and systems tend toward disorder on a global level. We have equations that very accurately describe this distribution.

With these breakthroughs we had enough data to simulate accurate matter distributions of the current universe, observe and accurately model matter distributions in the distant past, and use that model to find a best prediction of what may happen in the future with what we currently know. All three lines of evidence point to a universe that is roughly 13.8 billion years old with a definite beginning and end state.

This can still be reconciled with spiritual beliefs if your willing to redefine eternity to something more like an eternal cycle of rebirth with the heat death of one universe bootstrapping the creation of the next iteration. You may enjoy Futuramas bit on it.

All sufficiently advanced techniques and technologies appear to be impossible magics to the unlearned.

The actual answer is

1. because the universe had to pick a finite number and it probably doesnt use meters as an internal measurement ruler for scaling so it’s an arbitrary large random number to us.

2. Why did it have to pick a finite number? Because it has finite lifespan and resources for actualization. This forces hard speed limit.

3. The speed of light has nothing to do with light it’s a shitty name that makes understanding its true nature needlessly complex.

In actuality all massless waves/particles including photons, gravitational waves, and neutrinos will move at the speed of light, because thats as fast as anything massless can go. Its a universal speed limit for any real mass-particle, which is ultimately governed by Planck’s constant and the symmetry preservation of Penrose spacetime diagrams. Its the speed of causality a universal framerate limit that tells us the universe flows/computes through discrete microstates with ultimate precision limit bounds.

A few days ago I gotta message from google saying they “can’t verify my age” (meaning they want gov ID I’m sure) so I’m forced to use safe search and other stuff too.

Fuck. That!

To be more precice the universe appears driven to expand and maximize its potential for representing or becoming new distinct states, using the least possible input. This is relates to complexity, microstate phase space, and computational cost to turn entropy into order.

This theme runs from the Big Bang and the formation of the first particles, to stars creating complex atoms, to our planet forming and RNA assembling from a primordial soup. Its the expansion of potential and possibility.

The universe’s ontology is one of maximizing the paths it can explore while minimizing the resources needed to make any specific outcome stable. This is the principle of least action, viewed through information theory and the expansion of phase space.

RNA and DNA are perfect examples. They require very little matter to form. They are just complex enough to bootstrap life and create endless variation through mutation, which preserves a vast space of possibility. Yet they are not so complex that they could not arise from random chance in a primordial soup. They are seeds for unique actualization and complexity stratification at relatively little energy and matter cost paid while also keeping the door open to further new stated of becoming in the next iteration. It is an information-theoretic optimization tradeoff on which order and entropy interact, where their meeting boundaries create novel complex phenomenon.

Its pretty cool!

Postal Dude? Is that you?

Same story here. My first Space Age run went to Gelba, I didn’t like it very much and lost interest probably half way through. Glad I asked for recommendations this run. Volcanus is actually an interesting start with a big payoff.

I can name you many. Superjail, Squidbillies, Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law, robot chicken, aqua team hunger force, home movies, moral orel, the ooblongs, the boondocks, space ghost coast to coast. Thats not mentioning all the fox stuff like american dad or the anime toonami stuff like inuyasha

I highly doubt i would be recognized by anyone in any meaningful capacity. To draw attention and get internet clout you need to be a hyperactive poster, a mod for an active community, or engage in a little politics/drama otherwise nobody notices nobody cares. Im just some guy who says things and post whatever.

Sorry to hear that, did you ever manage to get the rocket to space?