Posted by Kim on May 24, 2025, 12:15pm
Are you as sleepy today as so many of us seem to me?
Actually, no!! I've been doing dance rehearsals for my last performance before leaving the state, and it has me charged up every day
Is the "leaving the state" thing for your move, or something else?
Yeah, I guess by leaving the state I meant leaving the country. It's just sometimes hard to wrap my brain around a move that big.
Well, I hope it's all been moving along smoothly and proceeds to go well.
I just finished the application, paid the fees, submitted my biometrics, and sent off my passport this week! All of the balls are now in the UK's court.
Considering strong themes in this year's enemies of misinformation and generative AI, was this EW maybe a little more catharsis/venting than usual? It was at least a good way to take things to really make folks hate the enemies this year!
The really funny thing is, this year's Epic Week theme, with the AI replicating through the space junk, was written and planned close to three years ago, basically directly after EW 2023 ended. There had been this push for us to clean out our canonical space junk for many years, and I wanted to do that as a theme, but I felt like there was only a small cohort of folks who really viscerally grasped the stakes of Space Junk being a problem in and of itself. I think most people think "launching it into space" is the same as putting something in an infinite junk yard where it will never bother anyone again. So I had written a plot-before-the-plot to really underscore why junk in orbit can screw stuff up, which meant that 2024's theme had to involve not cleaning up space, but a space disaster caused by not cleaning it up. So 2024 and 2025 were more or less planned out at the same time.
It was sort of a weird coincidence we were having someone in the US government advocating for redoing everything with AI that is simply not ready to write big time code in the months directly preceding the event, all of the intensifying problems with generative AI stealing jobs and churning out incredibly low-quality, weird anatomy art, and the constant race of companies adding AI to darn near every app whether it's useful or not becoming such a pervasive issue in the years and months since the plot was conceived.
However, even though it wasn't why AI was chosen as the baddie, those recent headline events DID influence the final flavor text for the AI monsters in combat, and I think that's a big part of why it ended up feeling more cathartic than if we'd just been fighting tropey Skynet knockoffs as they were originally penned. A lot of people seemed to be having a whale of a time using the AI's flaws against itself.
Did SAInet get nerfed (maybe to reduce overtime risk)? It's unusual to have a final boss with HP lower than the miniboss. If so, how much and in what ways was it nerfed?
The only way SAInet was changed was it had its HP scaled down. I tend to think of Epic Week in terms of group pacing, and ironically, in many ways, boss fights are sort of like intermission. Because they don't recover their HP and people can just pitch in fighting them whenever, the appearance of a boss usually signals break time for those who are dedicated warriors or riddlers who may have been intensively coordinating throughout their waking hours for the days preceding. I feel that having an intermission stretch too long does the opposite of re-invigorating enthusiasm, and causes folks to drift off. So yeah, the SAInet boss fight was shortened (but not made less brutal). Funnily enough I have a spreadsheet that calculates average # of people attacking the boss per hour and how many hours I am intending the fight to last and spits out the appropriate amount of HP, given the weapon spread for the year and how hard the particular boss hits.
Was there supposed to be another miniboss, but maybe due to time, it got dropped? If so, what was that boss like?
No. There was supposed to be one miniboss, again for pacing reasons. It had its HP slightly inflated as a result of being a singleton.
And it must be asked at some point: how are the critters doing? And how are they going to be affected by your move, actually?
Sigh. The guinea pigs are doing really well. They are unaware that in a couple of weeks they will be rehomed. =/ Taking them to the UK has proved nearly impossible.
The dog is a bit bewildered why we keep emptying the house of more stuff. She IS coming with us. It's a much easier process with cats and dogs.
Does Versailles (the dog) have to go through a quarantine process? I seem to recall that's a thing with emigration sometimes.
No, in recent years they let you take dogs and cats to get a health checkup and rabies vaccine re-upped within 7 days of your flight. With the right paperwork they just go right through customs with you! Also, apparently, ferrets. All other pets have some pretty hefty quarantines imposed on them.
along with moving your location, is Server also changing locations? Does the move in general have any effect on how the site operates?
Server will remain in the US a bit longer than me, but will likely move eventually. I want to get a better handle on the legalities we'll have to comply with; I know the UK has some stricter rules about adult verifications, for example.
We're kind of leap frogging our way overseas... Husband first, me and dog next, Server last
How do things work while you and Server are in different countries?
Pretty similarly to now -- Server and I have always been in different states!
I mean, in meat space. In the RPR plot space I carry him around most of the time.
You have a few times posted to topics in the Suggestions forum that a particular feature is "on your list". What are you most interested in working on next?
Right now there is a bit of a bottle neck behind some system updates that need to happen (I actually just posted about this here in an unrelated topic). As much as those are going to be tedious and time consuming, the fact I keep running into road blocks to the stuff I actually want to put out for the community is pushing that way to the top of my list.
I think that's kind of a boring answer, sorry.
Now that Epic Week is over, I'm really hungry to get that done and start spitting out Terra Incognita updates again, as much as the move allows me to.
What's Terra Incognita, in RPR context? I got here like a month ago
Oh hi! Welcome!!
Terra Incognita is a Big Slow Project I am working on behind the scenes. We did a fundraiser for it a year ago, which enabled me to get over a technical hump I had been caught on. The gist of it is combining the ability to make maps, have character avatars, and use those to show positioning alongside our existing chat and forum features.
Oh wow that sounds super involved!
It is! It's going slower than anyone wants it to because it is so complex, but I'm slowly slowly pushing that boulder up the hill. There's a description of the project goals up here: https://www.rprepository.com/lemonade-stand/project-goals
about Groups - when you search, you can choose to order them from "last edited", does that also take forum posts made in the group into account, or only announcements etc.?
Oooh that's a good question. I thiiiink it's just editing and not the forums, I'm double checking.
Seems like something that should be updated!
Official Contests Still Open!
A reminder that there's still time to get contest entries in!
Short Story Contest
The luck of a die roll will assign you a theme or topic, and then you'll write a short story to explore it. Last day to enter: May 26th Click here for complete rules!