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ant farms
 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-01-30 02:01 [#02624732]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular



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


 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-01-30 02:02 [#02624733]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular



im thinking of the ant farm because I just started playing
"Dwarf Fortress" and it reminds me of an ant colony.


 

offline ijonspeches from 109P/Swift-Tuttle on 2023-01-30 07:27 [#02624739]
Points: 7624 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



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.


 

online EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2023-01-30 08:13 [#02624745]
Points: 23969 Status: Addict



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...


 

online EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2023-01-30 08:29 [#02624746]
Points: 23969 Status: Addict



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


 

online EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2023-01-30 08:56 [#02624747]
Points: 23969 Status: Addict



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


 

offline ijonspeches from 109P/Swift-Tuttle on 2023-01-30 19:18 [#02624759]
Points: 7624 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



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.


 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-01-31 01:44 [#02624762]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular



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).



 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-01-31 01:47 [#02624763]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular



they were gonna make another (off brand) SimAnt but it got
cancelled because the devs blew their kickstarter money on
booze and strippers

mappatazee said made a small ant sim game too.


 

online EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2023-02-01 04:25 [#02624773]
Points: 23969 Status: Addict



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


 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-02-01 05:35 [#02624774]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02624773



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 a bug involving dead cats showing up
in taverns.


 

offline Wolfslice from Bay Area, CA (United States) on 2023-02-01 05:42 [#02624775]
Points: 4691 Status: Regular



that guy made a few million pretty much overnight and it
honestly couldnt have happened to a nicer guy


 


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