As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.
A few weeks ago, as I waled to the coffee shop where I spend a lot of my writing time, a woman coming the other way pointed to me and said “Tacit Rainbow!”
Normally I answer people who randomly greet me on the street (when you wear bunny ears everywhere you go, this happens a lot), but on this occasion I was so gobsmacked I just stood there with my mouth hanging open until she’d passed.
So, a little backstory. “Tacit Rainbow” was the code name for a US Air Force project in the 80s and 90s. The plan was to create a cruise missile that could be launched near suspected enemy surface-to-air missile batteries, to replace Wild Weasel pilots.
The missle (by today’s standards, it would be considered a cross between a missle and a drone) would loiter, flying circles around the area until the enemy activated its anti-aircraft radar. At that point, the Tacit Rainbow would automatically lock on to the enemy radar and follow it down, destroying the SAM battery’s control and tracking capability.
AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, the only one left in the world, on display in a museum. The Tacit Rainbow was the world’s first loitering munition.
Flight test of an early Tacit Rainbow prototype. It has two sets of wings to give it tons of lift for extended loiter.
The Tacit Rainbow project was canceled some time in the early 90s without ever going into production. I wasn’t particularly a military buff or anything, but when I heard about the project in the 1980s, I really liked the way those two words, “Tacit Rainbow,” sounded together. I adopted Tacit Rainbow as my handle on old-school computer BBS systems. For a time, more people knew me as Tacit Rainbow than knew my real name.
Thing is, I only used that name from about 1988 to about 1996 or 1997 or so. Classic computer bulletin board systems were text-only, no graphics. To my knowledge, there are no photos of me from those days attached to the name “Tacit Rainbow.”
Not that it would matter. I looked a lot different back then. Here’s a photo of me from the days I ran a BBS called a/L/T/E/R r/E/A/L/I/T/Y:
Today, not only have I not used the name Tacit Rainbow in 30 years, the only vestige remaining is my AOL email address “tacitr”. I got that email address in 1992, truncating it because at the time AOL dodn’t allow names as long as “Tacit Rainbow.” I still have it, and even still use it occasionally.
The idea that someone randomly wandering down the street would recognize me from a computer BBS handle I used thirty years ago was so jaw-droppingly improbable I just stood rooted in place until she was gone.
Had I had my wits about me, I would have been like, “Wait, hang on, do we know each other? Were you a BBS regular back in the day? How on earth do you know that name?”
Somewhere around, I don’t know, 1998 or 1999 or so, I was sitting in front of my computer when a chat window popped up asking me if the name “tacitr” came from Tacit Rainbow. When I said it did, the guy was like “OMG, were you on the project at Northrop? I was one of the lead engineers, retired after it got canceled. Did we work together?”
I explained that I wasn’t part of it but I knew about it and took my name from it because I liked the way those words sounded together, and we ended up chatting for about two or three hours. Really interesting guy. The project was fascinating and had some incredibly advanced avionics for the time, though apparently it was plagued by mismanagement, which is apparently one of the biggest reasons the DoD canceled it.
I still would dearly love to know why a random woman on a random street in Portland looked at me and said “Tacit Rainbow!” There’s a story there I will likely never know.
NOTE: This blog post was updated on January 25, 2025. Update at end.
If you own a website that uses stock images or even images you’ve taken yourself, beware a scam floating around that tries to trick you into putting links to another site on your pages.
I recently received a phony “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” run by a scammer attempting to get backlinks to a site called KnowYourSins, a sex site run by two people named Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (@Olivia_kys on Twitter).
The letter claims to come from a law firm called “Commonwealth Legal Services” in Phoenix, Arizona. Here’s a screenshot:
So, the first thing to know about this email is it’s very unusual for a DMCA complaint, which is almost always a takedown request, not a request for a backlink.
The second thing to notice is there’s a standard format for DMCA takedowns, and they must, by law, include:
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized.
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
The image itself comes from Unsplash, specifically this one, and it was taken by Eric Lucatero, who has no connection with KnowYourSins dot com.
Huh.
Commonwealth Legal Services
I looked at the website of the supposed “law firm” that sent it, justicesolutionshub.info. Now, the fact that it uses a .info top-level domain immediately set off warning bells in my head as well.
“Zoe Baker” signs this email “Trademark Attorney,” yet the page on justicesolutionshub.info lists “her” as a “business legal consultant.”
Huh.
On top of that, notice anything funny about all these headshots? Look closely.
Yup, they’re all generated by AI—specifically, they all come from This Person Does Not Exist.
How can you tell?
AI deepfake faces generated by This Person Does Not Exist always have eyes in exactly the same place exactly the same size and exactly the same distance apart. It’s a limitation of the adversarial GAN software that creates the fake faces.
You can see it if you stack the faces on top of each other and make them translucent in Photoshop.
I looked up “Commonwealth Legal Services” on Google. It turns out there are a bunch of different websites at different URLs all using the same exact web design with the same copy and the same pictures: justicesolutionshub.info, cwsolutions.biz, elitejusticeadvisors.biz (currently offline), and more.
The front page of justicesolutionshub.info shows a photo of a building. The office building is a stock photo rendering that you can put any logo in front of.
This is an Adobe Photos stock photo rendering created by digital artist “Esin.” A surprising number of phony fly-by-night bogus “companies” use this stock image as their corporate headquarters on their About or Contact pages.
Things really take a turn for the surreal if you put the address of “Commonwealth Legal Services,” 3909 N. 16th Street, Fourth Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85016 into Google Street View. This one weird trick produced results you aren’t going to believe:
Note the conspicuous absence of a fourth floor. As of the time of writing this, the building is currently listed for sale.
Okay, so we have a fake DMCA takedown request from a phony law office attempting to blackmail me into putting a backlink to Know Your Sins from my site.
Know Your Sins
So, what is Know Your Sins?
It’s a more or less generic BDSM information site with precious little in the way of in-depth information, using largely AI-generated content and stock photos.
I can see a couple of possibilities:
Know Your Sins is scamming in a desperate bid to attract backlinks and improve their search engine ranking.
Know Your Sins is a victim; they hired a dodgy “we can boost your search engine ranking” scammer, not knowing that he was engaging in fraud.
I emailed the contact address at Know Your Sins, hello (at) knowyoursins (dot) com, to try to get some insight. So far, as of the time of writing this, I have not received a reply. I will update this blog post if they get back in touch with me.
I’ve also been in touch with several webmasters who have received identical DMCA complaints, at least one of whom was accused of pirating a photo he took, all with demands to link back to Know Your Sins.
The Know Your Sins domain registration is hidden by Privacy protect. I’ve filed a formal complaint with them, since they claim they’ll rescind the privacy protection on sites that engage in spamming or fraud. (I urge anyone who’s received one of these scam emails to do the same using the “report abuse” form here.) If they reply, I’ll post the results.
Isn’t there a penalty for false DMCA takedown requests?
No. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t.
There are penalties for impersonating a lawyer, and for fraud. The emails are definitely fraud, and I do not for even half a second believe the person sending them is a lawyer, so there may be avenues of legal action there. I suspect, given that others are reporting these emails but they don’t always demand a link to Know Your Sins (some of them demand links to other sites), that what’s most likely happening is a scammer is selling his services to desperate website owners who want more Google linkbacks but don’t care too much if they’re totally on the up and up.
The lesson here
Genuine DMCA takedown requests must follow a certain specific legal format (including a statement that under penalty of perjury, the person sending the request has a good-faith belief that the claimed infringement is genuine), and don’t ask for linkbacks.
If you get a “DMCA warning” or “DMCA takedown” that asks you to link to another site, you’re being scammed.
If you’ve received one of these fake takedown requests, I’d love to hear from you! I’m in the process of trying to strip the Privacy Protection from the knowyoursins domain registration, and the more examples I have, the better. Please feel free to email me at franklin (at) franklinveaux (dot) com.
UPDATE JANUARY 25, 2025
A lot of people have sent me copies of similar fake DMCA emails demanding linkbacks to knowyoursins dot com. The site is registered at GoDaddy. This morning, I had a long and interesting conversation with a member of the GoDaddy abuse team, who has told me that GoDaddy is opening an investigation into knowyoursins dot com for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.
Have you received a “DMCA takedown” demanding a link to knowyoursins dot com? GoDaddy’s abuse team would like to hear from you.
Create a new report, choose the “Phishing” option, and in the details section, put a copy of the fraudulent email you received, with a brief explanation that you are reporting the site for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.
And, of course, I’d love to see copies of the fraudulent emails you’ve received.
Some while ago, I answered a question over on Quora about whether or not it’s okay to pirate a video game if you can’t afford it. I write for a living, which of course means I take intellectual property seriously. Also, I write for a living, which means I don’t have very much money.
So, as you might imagine, I answered no, it’s not okay to steal other people’s work, even if you can’t afford to buy it, and as an example I used Starfield, the massive single-player role-playing game from Bethesda.
I like Bethesda games. I have, as of the time of writing this, sunk over 1,990 hours into Skyrim and 1,570 hours into Fallout 4. I’ve itched to play Starfield since I first heard of it, but at seventy bucks for the “normal” game and a hundred bucks for the “premium” version, I was like nah.
So, Quora being what it is, one of the kind folks over there bought me a copy, and another friend on Quora gave me a machine that could play it.
Which was amazing.
I now have about 225 hours in Starfield, and it’s so, so close to being a good game, but it just…isn’t.
All the ingredients are there for a truly amazing game except one: the game designers forgot to make it fun.
It’s an innovative game. It’s a pretty game, in places (and in places it’s howlingly bad). It has a bunch of cool, well-thought-out design ideas. It’s just not fun.
So, let’s do a deep dive into why Starfield misfired so badly. Caution: Long essay is long.
Part 0: WTF is Starfield?
It’s Skyrim in space. Seriously, it’s Skyrim in space.
If you know and love Skyrim, you’ll largely know what to expect. You, a blue-collar miner in the ass end of the explored universe, come across a Cosmic Mystery™ that catapults you on an adventure. Along the way, you’ll team up with companions who will guide you (and maybe marry you), you’ll engage in countless battles, and you’ll develop strange powers never before seen, only instead of gaining powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty bow and an overpowered Sneak skill, you’ll gain powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty laser gun and an overpowered Sneak skill.
You’ll also gather resources to build outposts on widely-scattered planets, rather than gathering resources to build settlements in widely-scattered parts of Boston.
Honestly, this sounded like pure pixelated crack cocaine to me. (Did I mention I’ve over a thousand hours in both Skyrim and Fallout 4?) Take a mashup of Skyrim and Fallout and put them in SPAAAACE!!!!!™? Sign me the hell up! What’s that you say? I can design and build my own spaceships too? You already had me! Let’s do it!
And yet…and yet…
Somehow, it manages not to be nearly as interesting as Skyrim or Fallout. It’s huge—a hundred worlds with endless procedurally generated terrain to explore—but it feels tiny. The main city in Starfield, New Atlantis, is the largest city Bethesda has ever created, but it feels stifling.
So what went wrong?
Part 1: The Bits that Work
Before I do a deep dive into the parts that went off the rails, I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot to like.
The spaceship crafting is amazing.
This is my ship, Anopheles.
This is a ship I have in one way or another been working on for forty years. Back in my high school days, I played in a Traveller pen and paper role-playing game (remember that? The game where you could die during character generation?) with my best friend down the street and the rest of my friends circle. We flew around in Anopheles, named for the mosquito that carries malaria—a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship, fast and light, with no armor but a hell of a punch.
Later, after university, I ran a hard-SF GURPS Space game for about five or six years, in which the players explored the Rich Cluster, a small globular star cluster with about a dozen habitable worlds all quite close to each other, in which the players flew around getting involved in weird political messes in Anopheles—you got it, a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship named after the mosquito that carries malaria.
My Starfield ship was again a tiny, heavily-armed craft with a long spine projecting from the front that carries a bunch of particle beam weapons that chew through much larger, more heavily-armed spacecraft.
I had endless fun designing this ship, building it, upgrading it, improving it.
A fair bit of Starfield involves space combat, and the Starfield ship to ship combat system is complicated, with many different classes of weapons (lasers, missiles, railguns, particle beams) that you assign to different mouse buttons. Some weapons are good against shields, some against the enemy hull. You can fire at the enemy in general or target different systems (engines, FTL drive, shields, weapons). You need to use different weapons at different times—projectiles, for example, are effective against a ship’s hull but ineffective against shields, so you use lasers against the shields until they’re down, then switch to—
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I’m kidding.
I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and during combat you’re supposed to think about how you allocate power between different weapons sysstems and engines and shields and such, but as soon as you figure out that particle beam weapons work against shields and ships, you just stop faffing about with all that, put the biggest reactor you can on your ship, load it down with particle beam weapons, and tear through ships four times your size like they’re tissue paper.
The companions are really well done.
At the start of the game, you end up joining a group called Constellation, intent on uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Many of the companions you can choose from are Constellation members, but they’re all different.
The companion characters’ personalities are nuanced, subtle, and complex. The first companion you travel with is so well done that I ended up not starting an in-game romantic relationship with her because she reminded me in subtle ways of the judgmental bossiness of a real-life ex enough to give me the shivers.
Instead, I ended up marrying Andreja, the introverted, possibly-on-the-spectrum badass with the secret past.
Andreja is BAE. And if you marry her, the wedding gift she gives you is amazing. Not, like, in a game mechanics way, but symbolically.
Fallout allows you to romance multiple characters who are all, apparently, totally on board with you having more than one lover. Not so in Starfield, where monogamy is apparently Very Much A Thing and romancing one character means no more nookie from others unless you divorce first. Limitless technological advancement, suburban 20th century American values.
Some of the quests are amazing.
As with Fallout 4, the companion you choose to travel with can give you quests. The quest you get from Sarah starts out seeming pretty predictable, and about halfway through I was rolling my eyes, certain I knew how it would end…but the game surprised me. It’s really well done and handled with exquisite care.
The quest Entangled has you flipping back and forth between two different timelines after an accident in a research facility. It’s nothing like any quest I’ve played in a computer RPG before, it never stops being cool, and overall it’s an absolute blast.
The same corridor in the two different timelines in Entangled
There’s a whole series of quests centered on rising through the ranks of corporate spy/fixer at a megacorporation called Ryujin Industries that I can only imagine was as much marvelous fun to write as it was to play (tip: bump up your Stealth skill before you do it!).
Ryujin’s corporate HQ
The Music
I mean, it’s Inon Zur. Of course it’s good.
I personally like the Fallout 4 soundtrack better—there’s more variety, and the music is less ambient (the main theme and Of Green and Grey still give me chills), but seriously, that man could write music based on his shopping list and it would be amazing. The only video game music that has ever stuck with me like the soundtrack from Fallout 4 are the songs Nightsong and Outlaw Harbor C, both from World of Warcraft.
The “New Game+” system is…um.
I’m honestly not sure whether to put the NG+ system in the Bits That Work section or the Bits That Don’t. So let’s do this:
Part 1.5: New Game+
Starfield has this thing that happens, that Bethesda called “New Game+”, that lets you start a new game without starting a new game.
Okay, so (minor spoilers for the main story):
The game starts out with you, a lowly miner in a miserable backwater, carving out a mysterious possibly-alien artifact from the rock. The moment you touch it, you have a Cosmic Experience with lights and music and trippy visuals, and so you’re tasked to take the strange artifact to Constellation and that kicks off the main adventure.
As you collect more of these ancient maybe-alien artifacts, you find temples that grant you strange powers, and eventually you learn that the artifacts can be assembled into this nexus that lets you skip between alternate universes.
If you choose to leave the universe you’re in for a different universe, it’s like starting a new game: you start out at Constellation with no money, no possessions save for a really freaky-ass Starborn spaceship (because you’re Starborn now, a member of a rarified handful of people with the ability to cross between parallel universes), except that you keep your character level and all your skills and abilities.
Hence, New Game+. You’re starting a new game, only with on old character you’ve already developed.
The good: You can explore all the various ways to end different quests or all the various factions you can side with without actually starting a new game from scratch. Don’t like the way things turned out? Wish you hadn’t sided with that faction? Leave this universe behind for a new one, where nobody knows you and you haven’t done any quests, and start again! It’s a really cool idea.
The bad: Implementation sucks.
I was sad to leave behind Anopheles but eager to see what I could do with this really freaky alien Starborn ship that I got.
Answer: Nothing.
Nothing. You can’t upgrade it. You can’t swap out any parts of it, or customize it, or modify it. You can’t sell it. You can’t do anything with it except customize the furniture inside, and the layout is so weird there’s really not much you can do even with that. One of the coolest parts of the game, and it just doesn’t apply when you flip between universes.
So you’ll probably want to capture, buy, or hijack a ship in every new universe, just so you can, you know, play with the shipbuilding parts of the game.
The cities are all laid out exactly the same way in the alternate universes; every major non-procedurally-generated location is precisely the same. Yet for reasons I cannot comprehend, they act like brand new locations—you can’t fast travel to them without visiting them on foot first, even though they’re all the same.
You shift between universes with nothing. Not even your spacesuit or clothes. You’re given a new spacesuit to go with your new spaceship, but no clothes, no money, no weapons, no tools, nothing. I think it would be far more interesting if you shifted with your clothes, some money, and perhaps a limited amount of equipment—like fifty kilograms or twenty kilograms or whatever. Enough to take some things that you really like, but with a small enough limit you have to make choices.
In the game, the Starborn are all pretty universally assholes, and after you’ve played NG+ you can see why. When you can just blamf to a new universe to escape the consequences of everything you’ve done, the stakes suddenly get very, very low. It would be cool if consequences somehow followed you. In every universe, you keep getting harassed and attacked for no readily apparent reason by other Starborn who seem to think you’re “unworthy,” but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Maybe if different factions of Starborn reacted differently to choices you made in the universes you left behind? Dunno, just spitballing.
Part 2: Why The Game Misfires
At this point, Bethesda has such a reputation for launching games in a buggy, half-finished state and fixing everything after it goes out the door that complaining feels like piling on.
But still:
It’s buggy it’s buggy it’s buggy oh my God it’s buggy
When I first got the game, it was unplayable. My game system is AMD Athlon/Radeon based, and for a while it would swear the graphic card drivers were outdated on launch every time, even though they most assuredly weren’t.
It would also crash about 25% of the time on loading screens between locations, until I learned to turn contact shadows off in the game settings, which mostly fixed it.
Later patches of the game gradually improved the stability, to the point where I now play for hours without a crash, but it took a while to get there.
While the game doesn’t crash constantly any more, the procedural generation still needs help. It has a weird habit of putting rocks and random boxes and other elements not touching the ground.
This kind of stuff happens very frequently. There are parts of the game where rocks are supposed to be floating in midair, because there’s an “antigravity element” in the game. This isn’t one of them.
Like most Bethesda games, there’s a crafting system. You can modify your weapons and spacesuits, craft pharmaceuticals, and make other items at various types of workbenches.
And the whole system is buggy AF. A workbench will often say that you can’t use it because someone else is using it even when there’s no human being within a light year of you. (Sleeping on a bed sometimes fixes it.)
Or it will say that a workbench is “obstructed” and can’t be used when it’s not. (Shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it—yes, I’m serious.)
Or you’ll go through the animation to use it and then just…stop, and you won’t be able to craft anything. (Again, shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it, no idea why.)
The lockpicking minigame
Fuck me, it’s annoying. I actively look for reasons not to pick locks.
Every Bethesda game has a lockpicking minigame. You stick something, whether that’s a lockpick or a bobby pin, into a lock and turn. There’s a “sweet spot” where if you position the lockpick right it opens, otherwise it sticks, and there’s a chance it might break the lockpick. Simple, self-evident the first time you do it, easy…and dull.
So Bethesda said “why not make the lockpick thing an actual game?”
Great idea. Terrible execution.
It’s tedious, it’s complex, there’s almost no on-boarding so you have no idea what you’re doing, and every time you try to pick a lock and give up in frustration you lose a lockpick…and in this game they’re scarce.
It’s not at all obvious how the lockpicking system works, especially when it gets complex with higher-difficulty locks—I’ve read a half dozen tutorials and I’m still often confused (as are other players, judging from the number of tutorials and the comments on them). I predict that it won’t be long until someone makes a mod to skip the lockpicking minigame. When they do, I’m installing it, assuming I ever decide to start playing again.
The outpost system
Jesus Christ on a three-legged tap-dancing camel, the system of establishing colonies on distant worlds is deeply broken—a confusing, poorly thought-out mess that’s the exact opposite of fun.
Fallout 4 introduced a settlement system, where you, the player, can build and secure little towns that attract settlers, build houses, plant crops, set up defenses, create supply lines between settlements, even set up artillary you can use to call down strikes for a certain distance around the settlements.
Starfield takes that system and makes it crappier in every single way.
The ensuckification of the settlement system knows no bounds. It’s complex, obtuse, requires investment of way too many skill points, and the player is thrown into it with no tutorial and no clear guidance whatsoever.
The idea is simple: Different planets have different resources, like iron and titanium and fluorine and whatever. You can land on just about any planet, plonk down a settlement, then place buildings, resource extractors, resource storage, walls, defenses, and so forth. Resource extractors will automatically mine resources, then transfer them to storage bays so you can come collect them later.
Each storage unit can only hold so many resources, though, and it gets tedious to come back and keep picking them up. If only you could make them available wherever you wanted!
Wait, you can!
Maybe. I mean, I think you can? I’m not really sure. I spent hours trying to figure it out and I still have no clue how it works.
You can set up in-system and interstellar shipping lanes between your outposts. Or rather you sorta can, there are ways to do it, but apparently they rely on loading your outpost with Helium-3 or something? That’s what all the online tutorials say, but I was never able to load Helium-3 into any of the transport ships; there’s a place where you supposedly do it, but whenever I clicked on it and hit the Interact key, nothing happened.
I was finally able to set up an outpost on a planet with Helium-3 and connect a Helium-3 extractor to the cargo ship pad instead of to a storage tank and I think that worked. I saw cargo ships come and go, but I have no idea if they actually moved any resources around.
There are dozens of tutorials on Starfield outposts and I read every one and still have no idea how to make it work. Apparently you can move certain resources in certain directions but you can’t link all your outposts to each other like you can link all your settlements together in Fallout 4. They have to be linked in a line, maybe? I don’t know.
While I was fumbling around with it, I somehow got an achievement:
2.6% of all players managed to link five outposts together. That tells me this part of the game is just as confusing to 97.4% of players as it was to me. I had a quest to link an outpost to a city, but I was never able to complete it successfully. Fukifino.
There’s absolutely no in-game explanation for how this works. None. Zero. Zip. I say without exaggeration or hyperbole that if a saboteur had somehow gained employment with Bethesda for the purpose of screwing up their next-gen AAA game, he could not have done a better job of cacking things up than what the game designers did with outposts in Starfield. It’s that bad.
“Poor on-boarding” and “completely opaque game mechanisms” are pretty much the hallmark of Starfield, which I gather from spending a lot of time Googling how to do things in the game put off a lot of players, like a whole lot.
Lord of the Rings is a movie about walking. Starfield is a game about running.
Hope you like big open spaces, because Starfield is the Game of Big. Open. Spaces.
When you play Skyrim or Fallout 4, they feel…dense. You get the sense that you’re actually in a place. Like, a physical place, with roads and shops and pathways through the landscape.
This:
is a pretty typical view from Fallout 4. (Yes, I play on an iMac, what of it?) You have a sense of place. This feels like a real environment. All those buildings? You can go to them, explore them, wander around in them. Every object in Boston was placed by a person.
Starfield gives you 100 planets to explore, but they’re all pretty much the same.
This is a procedurally generated map of a section of a planet in Starfield. It’s a big expanse of nothing with pre-formed buildings plonked down at random locations.
There’s about a dozen or so types of buildings that can be placed: an abandoned cryo lab, an abandoned weapons factory, an abandoned research tower, and so on.
Thing is, every single one of these buildings is identical. The abandoned cryo lab you find on one planet is exactly the same as the abandoned cryo lab you find on a different planet, down to the map, the location of chests, where the enemies are, the location of dead bodies, everything. If you’ve been in one abandoned cryo lab you have, quite literally, been in all of them.
And they’re scattered at random with no rhyme or reason, separated by kilometers and kilometers of empty space, no roads, no nothing. Just “okay, I think I’ll bould a research tower here.” “Yeah, I’m going to put a weapons factory two kilometers away.” “Cool. Is yours abandoned?” “Well, except for space pirates, yeah. Yours?” “Space pirates, yeah.”
You never get the sense you’re actually exploring a space. Even the main cities are just plopped down surrounded by identical buildings placed at random around them. At no time in my 200+ hours did I ever once feel “wow, cool, I am really in a different place!”
Here’s a procedurally generated planet. There’s a randomly placed building in front of me, identical to every other building of its type. 798 meters away is another randomly placed building. If I want to go from here to there, I…
…run almost a kilometer.
No, I can’t get in my ship and fly a kilometer. I have to run. Yeah, it takes as long as you think. You spend a lot of time in this game running across empty terrain from one building you’ve seen a hundred times already to a different building you’ve seen a hundred times already.
In other games, every location is different. You descend into a Dwemer ruin or a grand burial chamber inhabited by undead in Skyrim and they’re all different from each other. Here, you go to Abandoned Cryo Lab #117, pixel for pixel identical to all the other 116 Abandoned Cryo Labs you’ve been in, and filled with the same enemies in the same location…
…and oh, how you will come to hate the Abandoned Cryo Lab. It’s hands down the worst designed dungeon I’ve ever seen in any RPG. (This seems a popular opinion, by the way. One guy online talked about how he simply memorized a path through the Abandoned Cryo Lab and just speedruns through it whenever he finds one.)
The Sooper Sekrit Powers™ Minigame
In Skyrim, your character can unlock “shouts,” kind of like magic spells written in the language of the dragons. Every so often you’ll find a ruin with a “Word Wall” in it. The Word Wall has writing on it in the dragon language, and when you get close, a swirling light surrounds you and you learn a new spell.
Something almost identical happens in Starfield. Every now and then, you find an ancient temple. The ancient temple has a stargate ring-thing in it. You fly through it and you learn a new power, like the ability to alter gravity to fling enemies around, or make a duplicate of yourself in combat.
Pretty cool. Not new or groundbreaking, but pretty cool…
…except that from a gameplay perspective they fucked it up.
When you go into a temple, a Stargate SG1-style ring appears and gravity stops and you fly around. And then you get frustrated because you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you get bored and leave.
Then you go online, and you discover that there’s a lot of lens flare around a glowing ball hanging in space and you have to fly through that before you fly through the ring. Nothing in the game tells you that. Nothing. I have no idea how the first player figured it out.
But wait, that’s not really true. See, if you fly through the lens flare then fly through the gate, nothing happens. You have to fly through the lens flare five times (or sometimes four or sometimes twenty, I think it’s on a timer but I’m not sure) and then fly through the gate.
Seriously.
You have to do this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, every single time you find a ruined temple. Fly through the lens flare five times and then fly through the stargate and then kill me now please this is so fucking tedious it makes the lockpicking minigame feel like a luxury all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation please come back lockpicking minigame all is forgiven JFC.
I don’t know what game designer thought this would be fun, but that person needs therapy stat.
Oh, and then a dude comes out and says you’re not worthy so you shoot him.
The crafting system is completely broken
Fans of Skyrim and Fallout will by now not be surprised to know that Starfield lets you improve weapons and armor and spacesuits and such, just like you can in those other games, but once again they’ve bolloxed it up.
This one is a twofer. You get two, two, two game-mechanical misfires for the price of one!
When you go up a level, you get points you can put into various skills. These skills make you a better shot or let you use boost packs (which are really rather fun) or get more power from your ship reactor or repair ship damage in battle faster or whatever, and just like in previous games, if you want to be able to make the best weapon or armor mods you need to spend points in the skills that give you better access to those mods.
Unlike in Skyrim or Fallout, that’s not enough.
After you’ve spent those skill points, you still can’t do the thing until you also go to a research station and research how to do them. Spending skill points only unlocks the ability to do the research. Doing the research then gives you the ability to modify your gun or whatever.
You have to do this multiple times for each part of your weapon or armor you want to modify…
…and it costs a tremendous amount of resources to do that research.
Which you then have to do over and over again as you gain more levels and spend more points.
It makes modifying your gear incredibly expensive and time-consuming, for what is usually fairly modest gain.
But wait, it gets shittier!
You can find resources on planets you explore, like iron or titanium or whatever. And then you spend resources on research so you can spend more research on making new gunsights or making your spacesuit bullet resistant.
But…
…there is a limit to how much stuff you can carry. There is a limit to how much stuff your spaceship can carry. And holy fucknuggets are the resources heavy.
One of the very first mods released for Starfield, before even the ability to create mods in a sanctioned way had been introduced, was a mod that made resources weigh less because after you’ve spent six or seven trips going to and from your spaceship carrying hundreds of kilograms of resources, you get a bit sick of it. (Oh yeah, that’s a thing: a lot of storage chests in this game have weight limits. Man that gets frustrating fast. Resource management in this game suuuuuuucks. People complained about the same problem in Fallout 76 so the game devs were like “hold my beer.”)
Again, it almost feels like they were intentionally trying to take the fun out of the game.
Reeeeesources!!!
While we’re on the subject…
Fuck me, Bethesda, do you understand what a “spacesuit” does?
Okay, so. You’re running (and running and running and running and running) along a barren empty expanse of nothing, just like you’ve been doing for the past ten minutes, and you find a crack in the ground with argon gas coming out of it.
Never mind how inane that is, suspension of disbelief, yadda yadda yadda, roll with it.
Now, you’re in a spacesuit. I want to emphasize this. You’re in a spacesuit.
Argon is a resource, so you walk over to the crack and collect some argon. Cool!
Only now an alarm goes off and you start taking damage because caution danger poison gas poison gas get away.
Let me reiterate this one more time:
You.
Are.
In.
A.
Spacesuit.
You are in a spacesuit. On a barren and uninhabitable, maybe airless, moon. You’re wearing a spacesuit. A spacesuit is the thing you are in.
And somehow you’re being poisoned.
By this argon.
Which is an inert, noble, non-toxic gas.
While you are in, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a spacesuit. Like, the thing you wear in space.
I don’t even know how to even.
Consensus says: Not a sticky game
I genuinely don’t see myself playing this game for a thousand hours.
I’d planned to play the game long enough to get every achievement you can get, but I gave up with one achievement still to go: reach Level 100. I’m currently level 70something…76, maybe? And I just cannot see myself slogging through what it will take to get to level 100. Ugh.
When you get an achievement, for hitting certain milestones or completing certain quests, you’re also told how many other players have earned that achievement. And judged by that metric, things look…dire.
More than half of players quit before they reach level 25—a level which is, just for the record, not that hard to reach. A bit more than a third have completed thirty missions that you can pick up in any bar or pub.
Less than a quarter finish Entangled, what I think is the coolest quest in the game and one of the best I’ve played in any role-playing game…ouch.
Fifteen percent mod a lot of weapons, in a game where modding weapons is a core mechanic…unfff that’s gotta hurt. These numbers speak to me of a game that just plain cannot capture people’s attention the way Fallout and Skyrim do.
Amazon just released a TV show based on Fallout, which is really quite good. I…don’t see that happening with Starfield. There’s just not a lot of “there” there. The procedural generation stuff…I get it, I get what they were trying to do, really, I get it, but oh my God. There are too few types of buildings and they are all…the…same.
And way too much of this game just feels like a chore. Running back and forth and back and forth with armloads of resources, repeating the same minigames over and over again, and the incomprehensibly baroque outpost system that I still haven’t figured out despite being in that rarified 2.6% of players who get the outpost achievement…how did this not get caught early in the development cycle? This is not a newbie company. This is a company that has an absolute talent for producing fun, immersive, addictive games…why is this game so goddamn dreary?
There’s a new addon to the game due in the next month or two, and I’ve been waiting for it with bated…hahaha no, I literally haven’t thought about it since it came across my Steam feed.
Will I get it? If it’s $7.99, sure. If it’s $19.99, no. If it’s $30, as a quick Google search suggests is likely, not just no but hell no. I got the game as a gift and I just cannot see myself spending money to play it any more.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go roll a new character in Fallout 4.
I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.
So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:
The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).
I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.
This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.
If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.
I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.
Thereupon I found a problem.
I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.
But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.
Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.
And honestly that would simply not do.
So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).
I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.
This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.
Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.
You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.
The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).
Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.
First up in today’s game of “who fed it and who ate it:” Artificial Intelligence.
AI is everywhere. AI chatbots! AI image generators! And now, AI code assistants, that help developers write computer programs!
Only here’s the thing: AI doesn’t know anything. A lot of folks think these AI systems are, like, some sort of huge database of facts or something. They aren’t. They’re closer to supercharged versions of the autocomplete on your phone.
Which means if you ask an AI chatbot or code generator a question, it does the same thing autocomplete does: fills in syntactically correct words that are likely to come after the words you typed. There is no intelligence. There is no storehouse of facts it looks up.
That’s why AI is prone to “hallucinations”—completely imaginary false statements that the AI systems invent because the words it uses are somehow associated with the words you typed.
AI Fembot says: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016. (Image: Xu Haiwei)
So, code generation.
AI code generation is uniformly terrible. If you’re asking for anything more than a simple shell script, what you get likely won’t even compile. But oh, it gets worse. So, so much worse.
AI code generators do not understand code. They merely produce output that resembles the text they were trained on. And sometimes, they hallucinate entire libraries or software packages that do not exist.
Which is perfectly understandable once you get how AI LLMs work.
In February, then again in March, the developer released updates to a library called “XZ Utils.” The update contained weird, obfuscated code—instructions that were deliberately written in a manner to conceal what they did—but because he was a trusted dev, people were just like 🤷♂️. “We don’t know what this code he added does, but he seems an okay guy. Let’s roll this into Linux.”
He seems a decent fellow. We don’t know what this code does, but what’s the harm? (Image: Zanyar Ibrahim)
Fortunately it was spotted quickly, befure it ended up widely used, so only a handful of bleeding-edge Linux distros were affected, but still:
What the actual, literal fuck, people??!
“This library contains obfuscated code whose purpose has been deliberately concealed. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Jesus. And it’s only March.
Developers should never be allowed near anything important ever.
One of the things I generally try to do is leave the world in a slightly better state than I found it. Of course, I’m not always perfect at that, but on the whole I think it’s a good goal to shoot for.
To that end, I recently started participating in BOINC again.
If you haven’t heard of it, BOINC is a system where nonprofit science research teams can solve computationally complex problems without having to build or buy time on horrifically expensive supercomputers, by using all the spare idle computation time of ordinary people who leave their computers on even when they aren’t using them. BOINC detects when your computer is idle, and donates CPU cycles to researchers, basically making your computer part of an enormous ad-hoc supercomputer. You can choose what research projects you want to participate in.
Back when I lived in Canada, I joined BOINC and allowed them to use my laptop to look for new treatments for diseases by studying protein folding.
I dropped out of BOINC when I came back to the US from Canada, but I’ve just re-joined again.
This is my old 2012 laptop, which now does nothing but BOINC. I’ve joined two research projects, Rosetta@Home (which does research on protein folding to look for new drugs and disease treatments) and World Community Grid (which looks for genetic markers for cancer and searches for cures for diseases that are too uncommon or appear in parts of the world too impoverished to be worthwhile for conventional for-profit pharmaceutical companies).
I have a computer that is essentially a backup Time Machine server and Web server, and I may run BOINC on that as well.
I would encourage anyone out there who wants to help solve real problems by donating idle computer time to join.
BOINC stops running whenever you use your computer, so it won’t slow you down, but it means your computer time isn’t being wasted whenever your computer is turned on but you aren’t sitting in front of it.
The difficulty lies in the fact that I can tolerate only a narrow range of temperature. Anything above or below that range is pain.
I inherited this trait from my mom, along with her resistance to local anesthetics. It has a name, in fact: “congenital thermal allodynia.” It’s caused by a genetic anomaly of genes that direct production of a class of receptor protiens called “transient receptor proteins,” or TRPs, particularly receptor called TRPA1 (which activates in response to cold) and TRPV1 (which activates in response to heat).
TRPV1, the sensor that makes painfully hot things painfully hot
Simplified, handwaving over details, many TRPs respond to changes in temperature, allowing ions to flow through into the nerve cells the receptor proteins are attached to if temperature goes above or below a threshold. When these receptors are found on pain nerves, triggering them results in pain. The temperature-sensing receptors produced my body aren’t formed correctly, so the heat-sensitive receptors trigger at too low a temperature and the cold-sensitive receptors at too high a temperature; a shower that’s perfectly fine for someone else is painfully hot for me, and cold showers are unbearable agony.
That’s the background part I.
So.
Some time ago, I severely burned my foot by dropping a kettle of boiling water on it, which is how I discovered that boiling water burns are just about the only things that suck worse than kidney stones.
The hospital gave me a shot of morphine, which did nothing except make me throw up, and prescribed oxycodone, which also did nothing but make me throw up. Finally, in desperation, I tried cannabis edibles, which I found worked far better than opiates on pain—cannabis was the only thing that made followup viits to the burn clinic tolerable.
That’s the background part II.
Incidentally to this, I also learned that cannabis edibles quench the thermal allodynia. It was, I must say, quite an amazing thing to be able to take a nice warm shower and have it, astonishingly, be a pleasant experience.
For the first time, I really understood what people mean when they talk about enjoying a hot shower.
Fast forward a few years, and I discovered, also quite by accident, that cannabis edibles put me in my body. Normally, my experience of the world is that I live in a ball behind my eyes, connected to and driven around by a meat machine that I can feel, sure, but that isn’t really me. The first time I ever had the experience of completely inhabiting my body was after an experiment with psilocybin mushrooms some years back; and boy, lemme tell you, the experience that I, the me that I am, reached all the way to the floor was fascinating.
I learned earlier this year that small doses of cannabis edibles, about 1.25mg of THC and 1mg of CBD, will induce the same thing.
I also learned, entirely by accident, that a low-dose cannabis edible plus a Mike’s hard lemonade will put me entirely in my body but also make the experience extremely unpleasant.
That’s the background part III.
Now that you know the background, allow me to get to the point of this essay, in which your humble scribe and his Talespinner decide to do “Science!”, and instead accidentally do real, honest-to-god Science!
So first, the “Science!”
Those of you who’ve followed the adventures chronicled herein may be aware that for the last three years I’ve been hard at work on various xenonorph-themed sex toys, most notably the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon.
I made a xenomorph hiphugger for my Talespinner as well, and also I’ve been working on a xenomorph facehugger gag, which I brought with me to Springfield.
Two nights ago, my Talespinner and I attended a play party a a local dungeon, at which she played the role of a captive experimental subject caged and parasitized by xenomorphs.
A great time was had by all—you know it’s a party when the facehuggers come out—and so, the next day, we decided to bring out the facehuggers again.
Being that it was close to New Year’s Eve, we got a bottle of aggressively mediocre spiced rum, nowhere near as good as the rum we had in Barcelona, but adequate to the task of toasting the end of an objectively shite year.
And in the name of “Science!”, my Talespinner suggested we replicate my accidental findings with cannabis and alcohol, because, as all reasonable people know, replicability is the foundation of both “Sicence!” and Science!
And so it came to pass, Gentle Readers, that your humble scribe took a low-dose edible and a shot of mediocre rum, his Talespinner strapped a facehugger alien to her hips, and we were off to “Science!”
I won’t disturb you with the details of what happened next, as they would..err, disturb you. However, I will tell you that what we learned was the experience of being in my body was overall quite pleasant.
Until I crawled, exhausted and spent, beneath the blankets.
And the cold blankets were…I won’t say agonizing exactly, but certainly agonizing-adjacent.
Here is where we move from “Science!” to actual bona-fide Science!
It seems that alcohol doesn’t actually make my perception of fully inhabiting my body unpleasant. Rather, what one recreational chemical giveth, the other taketh away. Where cannabis removes the thermal allodynia, alcohol brings it back. And the combination of extreme—some might even say unreasonable—temperature sensitivity and being more consciously aware of my body than I otherwise am is an experienced not to be missed, unless you can miss it, in which case I suggest you do.
I spent some time this morning scratching my head about this, as I would not expect, at first consideration, alcohol to affect transient receptor proteins.
I finally dod a Google Scholar search while we were on our way to the store to purchase tools for minor alien penis surgery, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an NIH article directly on point about this:
And so it came to pass, Gentle Reader, that our attempts to get jiggy with alien hiphugger parasites and recreational intoxicants actually resulted in a finding supported by genuine empirical Science!, namely that cannabinoid molecules can suppress congenital thermal allodynia, a result reversible by concomitant administration of ethanol.
Earlier this year, I received a significant sum of money in a settlement for a lawsuit. This settlement was enough to pay my lawyer, with a bit left over, which I had earmarked for a car since I’ve been sans vehicle after the unfortunate death of the Adventure Van (which needed new parts that are no longer manufactured).
I had earmarked some of the settlement for a cheap used car, when I was captured by Facebook. I spotted an ad for a desktop CNC metal-milling machine for almost exactly the amount I’d set aside for the car, and I thought, if I can machine aluminum, I can make molds for sex toys without having to 3D print them any more! The molds would be higher quality, last longer, and produce better toys!
So of course I ordered the CNC machine instead of the car, and arrived home from Barcelona to an enormous shipping crate…
They call it a “desktop CNC machine,” but I don’t own a desk large enough or sturdy enough to hold it—the thing weighs in at almost 120 pounds(!). So it sits on my bedroom floor, still in the bottom of the shipping crate.
And My God, what an adventure.
I didn’t fully realize what I was signing up for. Carving 3D models out of metal is nothing like printing 3D models on a 3D printer. You don’t give it the model and say “here,carve this.” You have to specify the tool to use, the speed, and (this is the difficult part) the exact path the tool will take, over and over and over again, to carve the shape out of metal.
As one wag on Quora put it, “Dude, what you’re trying to cut requires graduating from trade school plus four years of apprenticeship.” (Whoevel writes an AI-driven expert system to automate some or all this process will become ridiculously wealthy, just sayin’.)
Anyway, I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, and the learning curve is a cliff. This is quite possibly the most challenging thing I’ve ever attempted in my life.
I’ve worked out basic engraving…
…and I’m teaching myself Fusion 360 and Lightburn (it has a built-in laser engraver too). My wife has come up with some very cool projects to help teach myself, like tentacle fans with metal blades, which I’ll probably start selling once I’ve worked out how to make them.
But at the rate I’m going, I’m still quite a distance off from carving metal sex toy molds.
Orchids are cool, in a “nature is horrifying” way. There are species of orchid that have evolved structures that look like insects, which they use to lure in insects searching for mates.
Some orchids use these insect visitors to pollinate themselves. The insect does its thing and then flies off, horny and frustrated and covered with sticky pollen, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
But some orchids are carnivorous. They lure insects to their doom, slowly digesting their prey alive as the ill-fated insect struggles helplessly.
And some orchids mimic insect pheromones, sweeting the honeytrap with the same signals that female insects use.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about sexual parasitism of humans lately, in no small measure because I’ve finished the first version of the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, a Giger-esque nightmare sex toy first conceived by my wife Joreth. Imagine an alien facehugger that wraps around the subject’s hips, then incites the subject to seek out victims, violating them in a parasitic frenzy. As creepy as this image is, it’s table stakes in the game of real-world sexual parasitism, which is horrifying.
Anyway, that’s got me thinking: what if an alien species created mimics of human females to lure in the male of the species? (An idea for a horror novel with this theme is bubbling in my brain; stay tuned!)
What I’ve come up with so far is…well, pretty horrifying.
I’ve started work on a small, AI-illustrated graphic novella (is a graphic novella a thing?), though with all the projects in the pipe right now—including a version of the hiphugger strapon optimized for oral violation—it may be a while before it’s finished.
I tried to do a different thing, but I couldn’t do the thing I wanted to do that was different from the thing I did, so I did the thing instead. Then I did the other thing, too, so…things got done.
It started yesterday morning, when I woke intending to post a new episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, this one looking at sex work in different cultures. But what to my wondering eye should show up, but a database server error at my webhosting provider. As I waited for them to fix the problem, I…amused. Yes, that’s the word we’ll use. I amused myself by writing a quick and crude web page that generates random horror poetry and pairs it with a random tentacle image generated by a Stable Diffusion AI generator.
It’s still quite primitive, but it looks like this:
You can, if this strikes your fancy, check it out here:
