 |
|
You are not logged in! F.A.Q Log in Register |
 |
|
 |
 (nobody)...and 58 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
 |
Members 8025Messages 2613722 Today 0 Topics 127517 |
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
any one else like ant farms when they were a kid? when I was 5 or 6 years old, somewhere around '89, I had an ant farm the ants came through the mail in a little tube. I remember being super excited, and I remember watching the ants construct their nest then they all escaped and bit me all over |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
im thinking of the ant farm because I just started playing "Dwarf Fortress" and it reminds me of an ant colony. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
gazed at one at that age too. ants are amazing to watch. we had two towers in the garden past summer and hardly saw any of them. probably were eaten by our mice and or moved along. love to see all the insects, spiders, birds and rodents in our place. did you play sim ants too? didnt have it, but looks like it would have been great. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
never had one but actually always have been interested. ants get a lot of credit for engineering, but truth bee told, they are a society of automatons. as if you're born with your job description written on your forehead. this results in some cruel behavior, like, the male being pretty much flying sperm and killed and literally just thrown out the front door of the nest when the season is over. at least they're not as bad as ducks. what really settled it for me was some parasitic fungus or organism that basically pwnd the whole ant society. it took over a few key ants and then directed them to just take care of the ants they'd infected and cool super so capable of vastly intricate structures; feels like a little society. but they really seem to be quite static and inflexible. and never mind... i always did just want to try an ant farm, before i got into thinking any this... but now that i am, it sounds fascinating to watch.... "let's try to put into hardware what so many other evolutionary arcs have put into software" bees, though. they actually seem to have a thing where they add up into more than the sum of their parts, rather than being a very elegantly structured masterpiece society. but i'm terrified of them and the idea of my ant farm escaping and biting me actually bothers me orders of magnitude less than the idea of a single bee loose in my house... somewhere... just waiting to tear out... |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
hell, crows are more than the sum of their parts. they have one stand above and keep guard while the rest graze. they establish a mesh network via obnoxious fucking caw-ing way too early in the morning to let each other know where they're stationed, and, effectively, stake out turf for the day. they do the same at dusk for the evening. so they're just establishing a cloud and being obnoxious but then, if owls or hawks or such are about (which eat crows) they will then be even more obnoxious and out of sheer desperation of the fuckers waking me up and driving me insane when i'm trying to work, i realized: in the same way a cable modem is a coax line divvy'd up into precise frequency quantums for each customer, birds use rhythm to separate each other out. so if you want to irritate the shit out of a crow... well, at this point, i'm thinking neural networks and a patent, but... you have to drop into their groove and spill ice water on their lap. certain mouth noises drive them completely insane more than anything else i've tried and i'm still not sure why. especially if i managed to nail their crow funk beat and make the noises they freaking hate at the perfect most awkward times. and it disrupts their mesh network. and they fly off. did i mention a patent? but, yes. tangent point: birds establish a mesh network. tweeting to each other. forming a sort of cloud brain through constant pings of communication in the same way neurons ping about in a brain. except they have wings and flapflapflap |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
crows, a problem, like 2016. i figured out the basics. then years, literally years, no crow problems. but i move, and... this place, it has crows. i realize now it's about the sort of turf they prefer. but they're waking me up again and i dusted off my old vengeful widgets. that it's like farming; if i let up they'll eventually desensitize and come back and be just as bad. so i listen at times i know they're staking out turf. to see if i need to go out on a walk. and find them. that i literally walk around, until i find them, i make mouth noises like the austin powers "zip-it" scene, then CAW CAW and they fly off. a few rounds, and i only have to make a noise or two. sort of like working out, if i'm utterly on it, they literally just fly off when they see me now. like: oh, fucking hell, that asshole again and i've never harmed a feather on any of 'em. this is pure trolling. of birds. of a collective crow brain. that they simply drove me to it, but now that i'm here, i don't mind |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
i wonder why squirrels havent found that crow frequency or rhythm yet. three crows and a magpie regularly stalk the squirrels picking up nuts from the squirrel station and try to snatch it from them. never seen them succeed though. yeah love their sounds and talkin to them, usually they fly away pretty fast when i say anything even through the windows. dont alway mean to drive them away. only when they land on the balcony, which rarely happens, at least when someone is on the house. back to ants, they have a very small amount of code. like 3 lines or so, all the more amazes me what they achieve with it. as you pointed out, epic, that fungus seem to be the clever one in their relationship ^^ ants and lovebugs are quite fun too. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
I loved SimAnt! Played it a lot. SimTower and obviously SimCity also. Was stuck on a mac until like age 13, mac only really got Maxis games and LucasArts (+ Myst and a few others). |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
they were gonna make another (off brand) SimAnt but it got cancelled because the devs blew their kickstarter money on mappatazee said made a small ant sim game too. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
SimCity 2000, obsessed then and now. love it. once a year maybe, i actually i still go back and play it through every now and then. until you're just building launch archologies over everything but it's a whole ritual: i terraform the map before starting the game, then i turn off disasters (they ruin the algorithmic beauty of the game). i don't cheat, though. then, part of why i terraform -- i'm always trying different layouts, with an aim to leaving space for the launch archos, because i never quite get to Though there is no "true" victory sequence in SimCity 2000, the "exodus" is a close parallel. An "exodus" occurs during the year 2051 or later, when 300 or more Launch Arcologies are constructed; the following January each one "takes off" into space so that their inhabitants can form new civilizations on distant worlds.[7] This reduces the city's population to those who are not living in the Launch Arcologies, but it also opens wide areas for redevelopment and returns their construction cost to the city treasury. ...or, at least, i haven't in ages. but mostly i like making it pretty, and it's soothing and relaxing like tending plants or minding the grill |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
Yeah SimCity2000 was fucking great. Such a clean, well polished game for '93. I like the disasters tho ;p I recommend taking a look at Dwarf Fortress. It's just a couple guys working on it since '06. It used to be ASCII art (a bridge too far for me personally), but it just last month got a steam version with some rudimentary sprites. The level of simulation is off the charts. Spend 1 minute, if you're interested, and listen to the dev talk about the layers related to showing up in taverns. |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| |||||||||
|
|
that guy made a few million pretty much overnight and it honestly couldnt have happened to a nicer guy |
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Messageboard index
|
|||||||||
