Notices by Craig P (craigp@mastodon.social), page 2

@sinbad Corn is very much an Americas thing. Even before we arrived and murdered everyone and turned it into syrup, it was the magic staple of this hemisphere.

Yeah I'd prefer if we didn't have such a shitty, strange food thing happening, but corn was always gonna be the focus on this hemisphere.

I guess wheat and rice aren't too bad. They store a lot better, for starters.

Every few years a new 'superfood' trends, but the only two superfoods are corn and potato.

Everything we eat is rooted in either corn or potato. You think our economy is rooted in oil? It's rooted in high fructose corn syrup and potato starch.

The best way to store potatoes is to bury them. In a few months you'll somehow have even more potatoes.

Another holier-than-thou post about how we shouldn't 'squabble' and 'infight' and act holier-than-thou on social media. Instead we should unite and take action!

The reason we squabble here is because we are discussing how to take action. This is where we live, so this is where we discuss things.

And yes sometimes that means we discuss whether to take action against someone we can reach that is theoretically on 'our' side, rather than someone far away we can't reach.

@sinbad Damn, I wish I'd known you were doing it, I learned it the same way and could have tipped you off.

@sinbad Really? Shows you how much I know about structural engineering.

I can just say space robot armor can't be welded.

From a functional modeling standpoint, filling space with heavy braces is also more appealing than leaving the space ungreebled.

Hmm, although welding is probably more realistic, bolting just looks and feels nicer for a game where you can go in and yank things out.

In addition to the visual being cooler, it's more fun to detach with specific motions to cut bolts rather than a long, slow cutting motion.

@sinbad It does, but it's unclear how I'd constrain it properly. I did a few things, but I can't quite grasp where it's going wrong since there's several steps and I don't know how to examine the live scene in Godot.

@sinbad I THOUGHT that was what I was doing with the project function. It works fine for yaw, but then pitch spins on a stupid axis. My bet is that the up axis just goes bananas, I may have to simply manually set the rotation instead of using lookat.

Hmm, let's think to myself.

I have an orbital camera separated into yaw and pitch gimbals. I then steal that camera off the gimbals and move it around for another purpose.

Then I want to *move the gimbals into place* so we can have the camera stay in the same place.

Obviously this is just a matter of reverse-engineering the pitch and yaw of the gimbals, I've done it loads of times.

But I've never really touched Godot's transforms.

I think the best thing to do would be to project the camera position onto the plane of the yaw gimble, lookat, then project it onto the plane of the pitch gimbal, lookat.

Should work...

Adding in that burned-orange to the standard PDP-10 blue-white-navy really makes it feel 70s.

I bet there are loads of other old machines that used similar interfaces to the PDP-10, maybe it's wishful thinking on my part that the PDP-10 is the trendsetter.

But what's clear for sure is that LCARS is a reimplementation of that real-world UI, not a brand new concept.

These days due to Google's immense skill, it's nearly impossible to find original LCARS shots, but you can see plenty of interfaces inspired by various generations of it. Here's one.

The PDP-10 style "color runners" are the main notable element of these designs. On the PDP-10 these were labels for status lights, but on LCARS they seem to mostly be menu or folder buttons, with the status indicated by text or those bullet-shaped toggle decals. Which were also PDP-10 standard.

Its predecessor, the PDP-6, has the same fundamental layout... but instead of strips of colored white-blue-navy with glowing dots, it was just rows of faceless lights and switches. Viva la fifties.

For your breakfast brainfluff, here's a reminder that Star Trek's incredibly cool and famous LCARS is surprisingly similar to the PDP10. Both came out in 1966 and evolved steadily until the 80s, I assume symbiotically. Computer nerds tend to be Trekkies and visa-versa.

The entire idea seems deeply rooted in late-sixties aesthetic, just before the psychedelic colors of the 70s. I don't know if it's possible for people to recreate the unique flair now, sixty years after the fact.

But the visual certainly predates TNG, which was mid-eighties.

In Star Trek the Motion Picture, you can already see the foundations, and they became clearer with each movie.

But I think it's clear the PDP-10 had the time advantage. I think it's clear the PDP-10 inspired Star Trek, not the other way around.

A few displays using lights like these, which were juuuust becoming the norm.

To be clear, this is simply a sequence of horizontal status bars, but the lighting of the era was so primitive they have different yellow-green-red panels to give the yellow-green-red indicator.

The use of color as part of the interface itself was still on the horizon.