Basilisk

Vancouver has a steam heating system around Gastown, which is what powers the famous steam-powered clock there (at least since they repaired it).

The big question then becomes: "is that behaviour inherent to all systems like this, or just this one?" Like, if you go to the store, buy a basic sprinkler, and then test it and it behaves exactly opposite to how you might expect it to. Or it does something completely unexpected, like phases into another dimension and starts pumping strawberry jam. Your next step shouldn't be to say "Oh, weird, I guess that's that." You'd start knocking down variables. Is it the same with every sprinkler or just this one? Does the amount of suction applied affect it? If I replace the water with something else does the outcome change?"

If you're doing research like this, you're kind of expected to do the same sort of elaboration even if the result of a basic experiment conforms precisely to your hypothesis, because the question isn't if any given sprinkler setup behaves in this way, it's about whether this is a universal phenomenon across all similar setups. Because there's an xkcd for everything, it's this.

I've found that in general it doesn't matter. If the party gets in their head that it's a False Hydra, then they will typically ignore or justify the discrepancy.

Larian isn't especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.

By far the best way I've found to use the false Hydra so far is a week or two ahead of a session, to send out a link about the false Hydra to your group and be like "look at this neat monster I found!" Then present them with a story about people disappearing from a village and watch them invent their own false Hydra.

I think it's also fair to say that "too cold" is generally more livable than "too hot". It's quite a bit easier to generate and conserve heat than to ward it off, and even a planet that is so cold that its atmosphere has precipitated into snow could theoretically be survivable with habitat domes or the like, much like a proposed moon base. "Too hot," on the other hand, can potentially be hot enough to melt basically anything we send there, which is why there's a lot more focus on colonizing Mars right now than Venus.

FR It ain't like anyone's gonna be popping by for a visit. Landed nicely on the surface or energetically buried 30m below the surface, the ashes are still on the moon.

I've been playing Star Ocean the Second Story R since my fiancee bought it for me at Christmas.

I suspect it isn't that the test can't be done in the wild, simply that it hasn't been. There's some logistical issues to marking, releasing, and observing animals in the wild without being noticed that I expect makes working with captive animals an easier first step.

The problem is that "drive less transit more" is only an option if you live where transit is viable. If they were simultaneously investing money (or even reinvesting the carbon tax into) into subsidies for transit systems, cycling improvements, walkable cities, and the like so that these alternatives are accessible to everyone then there would be at least a carrot to go along with that stick. But there's virtually no amount of tax that will ever make trading a 30 minute car ride for 2 hours on and off with multiple transfers with the bus a reasonable alternative. And there's no way to get more people into buses or trains that are crammed full to the point of skipping stops even if you could somehow convince people to make that trade.

I can't help but feel like if we didn't live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I'd be more than happy to see "art as decoration" (as opposed to "art as a human means of expression") opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren't for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying "consume", but it's hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

Meanwhile, giving people who aren't necessarily "artistic" a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I'd love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their "style" with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.

... But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever's gonna happen you're not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.