Philosophosphorous

the Atlas is basically too slow (48 km/h or so) to be useful in mechwarrior 5 imo, you get better performance if you take a Battlemaster (about 64 km/h) and move all its rear armor to the front. set the 4 medium lasers in the chest to chainfire instead of all at once and you will have excellent damage output without a risk of overheating, while your left arm MGs blast away with negligible heat buildup and your shoulder SRM can be saved to finish off damaged enemies. (LRMs are heavy and useless against lighter/faster enemies since they will close to within your minimum range, they don't even do great damage ime at their optimal range unless your entire AI squad is LRM carriers and you are their spotter)

also i hate the transparent cockpit designs on battletech mechs, they should either have remote operated camera pods or tank-style periscopes unless they are particularly lightweight imo. the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980's angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.

i can't watch the video thru this link but from what i gather its like the boston dynamics robodog but with wheels for feet. adding wheels to robot legs is probably the Coolest design choice possible. it's ingenious really, you need something to be the 'foot', and that something might as well have built-in shock absorption and also spin to provide a traversal option that circumvents the major disadvantage of legged vehicles, speed on flat ground, without removing the capacity to use the legs to traverse more complicated terrain. skating quadruped robots might even handle terrain at speed that a car or traditional UGV might not ever be able to handle, using the agility provided by legs to position wheels. i want my car to be an oversized one of these so badly. i can't wait until someone makes a useable larger bipedal version of this, make my skating mecha dreams come true!

frankly tho i would just put the wheels on the main chassis separate from the legs for simplicity's sake, used with legs folded more like a traditional wheeled craft, so the wheels are still useable if the legs break and you don't have to put electric motors or wiring or whatever in inconvenient places through the legs. it would lose a little agility without 'mech skating' but i think it might be worth it for reliability/ease of manufacture/repair.

maybe those aliens are chill, worst case scenario id still rather be vaporized intentionally by a cool alien laser than randomly by space weather

it is a 'design' that spits in the face of aero-and hydro- dynamics, it invokes the wrath of the very elements if not the gods themselves. it is not 'designed' as much as 'not designed' as in: 'the cybertruck is not designed to withstand a pressure washing' or 'the cybertruck is not designed to be safely handled by unprotected human hands' or 'the cybertruck is not designed to cross even shallow water without failing'

there hasn't been any snow yet where i live

oh great another potentially galaxy-rending planet-destroying stellar catastrophe i can have intrusive thoughts about constantly. i thought getting inevitably enveloped by the sun or instantly vaporized by an unlucky space beam from a quasar or something or exploded by a large asteroid was bad enough. but there's also mobile black holes out there that we don't even know how to look out for yet. great. cool.

ponchos, loose jumpsuits with lots of pockets, and sci fi helmet + flowing robe combos will all be the future of fashion.

yea i love it, an amazing kind of liminal vibe with the impossible architecture. others in this thread already mentioned the game Naissance, but i also have to recommend the game Lorn's Lure, a game about being a cyborg/android and climbing very similar kinds of spaces. also there was an episode of Off the Air on adult swim that had a segment towards the end with a flythrough of a 3d fractal that had marble architecture aesthetics that remind me of this.

i don't know how they expect to 'establish a consciousness baseline' without a theory of information processing that can explain subjective experience. what is the algorithm that makes something experience? simulating a human brain on a computer will no more produce subjective experience than simulating a bladder will produce actual piss on your desk, as far as we know. it might tell us something about how consciousness works regardless, just as a bladder simulation can inform us about how a real bladder works even though you couldn't replace someone's actual organ with the simulation. regardless i am sure the information processing capabilities of humans will be more fully outclassed by computers eventually, or well enough to justify replacing paid human workers at least. although even current primitve LLMs require a lot of energy. like any other industrial revolution it will only be used to extract more profit instead of bettering society.

i don't know how they expect to 'establish a consciousness baseline' without a theory of information processing that can explain subjective experience. what is the algorithm that makes something experience? simulating a human brain on a computer will no more produce subjective experience than simulating a bladder will produce actual piss on your desk, as far as we know. it might tell us something about how consciousness works regardless, just as a bladder simulation can inform us about how a real bladder works even though you couldn't replace someone's actual organ with the simulation. regardless i am sure the information processing capabilities of humans will be more fully outclassed by computers eventually, or well enough to justify replacing paid human workers at least. although even current primitve LLMs require a lot of energy. like any other industrial revolution it will only be used to extract more profit instead of bettering society.

crossbows were more likely to be wholly owned by the local lord/baron and given out during wartime and taken back after, while longbows were relatively commonly available (if not exactly cheap or easy to make) civillian hunting tools as well as weapons of war. crossbows are the rich lord's peasant levy weapon of choice since it leaves the peasants disarmed afterwards as the crossbows are too expensive (difficult to manufacture metal crank parts etc. compared to 'self bows' like the english longbow that can be made entirely out of one piece of wood with a little experience with curing) to not take back after issuing. plus, since crossbows are simpler to use and require less training, the lords would invest less in military training for their civilians/militias, leaving the more vulnerable to military domination when they didn't have their lord's crossbows in hand, whereas many places encouraged longbow practice and military tradition to ensure they had enough bowmen should they need them for war, creating a decentralized military power base and cultural attitude of resilience and self-reliance among the populace. crossbows were a way to centralize military power in the hands of the aristocracy, not some kind of proletarian worker's weapon of choice (which was probably either a staff, a club, a repurposed woodcutting axe, an improvised spear, or a simple hunting bow). there were exceptions to this general trend like the Taborites (who were a peasant indurgency that was famous for using crossbows, murray bookchin claims they were a kind of proto-anarcho-communism), especially in places without bow traditions (mainland europe for example) and as time went on and political power in general became more centralized (in places with longer traditions of centralized power, china for example, the crossbow was more common due to more standardized 'state armies' compared to ad-hoc european feudal militias). its kind of like early factories, sure there might be nothing inherently and essentially wrong with the centralization of production itself, but the way it was used historically was at the behest of and for the benefit of the ruling classes. for example, the prominence of crossbows in continental Europe (they abhorred missile weapons compared to many other cultures, bow training had to be forced by decree after military experience proved this to be disastrous) is almost solely due to Italian city states (such as Genoa) mustering entire platoons of only crossbowmen that they would hire out as mecenaries. Crossbowmen often were paid double that of an archer, even though the bow took more training. think about why that might have been if they are supposedly the 'weapon of the people'

being bad at things we enjoy is existentially invalidating despite the lack of 'real stakes'. it's like having receding hairline, like obviously it's toxic AF to judge someone in a moral/ethical sense for balding, but as someone who is losing their hair it makes you feel like something is fundamentally 'inferior' about you compared to those who are not. you see people that have what you always wanted to have with no effort, they seem like they are just intuitively, instinctually, effortlessly 'better than you'. one of my best friends has always been effortlessly good at FPS games like that, constantly getting ridiculous scores like 100 kills to 17 deaths in short fast paced multiplayer games like call of duty, and its like they don't even play more than me, they haven't been doing it as long as me, i put in at least as much effort if not more so to win, but i can never even approach that level of skill. my K:D ratio is constantly negative, i can hardly ever break even let alone go 3:2 with 100 kills in less than 7 minutes. my thumbs are simply not that dextrous on the controller joysticks and never will be. it makes me feel like my existence is invalidated, that i was stupid for being interested in the things that i enjoyed doing and the games i enjoy playing, that my life is a waste of time that will only end in meaningless failure. i don't think its even 'irrational' as much as it is 'overly rational' in the sense of nihilistic naturalistic fallacy vulgar materialism. it's objectively better to win than to lose, 'self improvement' doesn't matter if you can't achieve it no matter how much effort an analysis you put into it. i don't lose in FPS games due to tactical mistakes, they are simply all faster at aiming than me because i am in my mid 30's and they are younger and have more efficiently functioning nervous systems. I am physically, objectively worse than them in a very real if limited and low stakes sense, and regardless of the fact that it is 'not an important arena' it is existentially invalidating in the sense that we all want to be the Effortless Beautiful Chosen Hero that succeeds inevitably and instinctually. failure reminds us that we 'are not special', that we have no special talent or skill that makes us unique, that the universe does not care about our success or failure any more than any other random chaotic physics event, that we are just another blank, bland NPC in the background of the rich beautiful successful people's lives and we will never be like them no matter how hard we work or try because the deterministic chain of causality just did not work out that way for us and its too late to do anything about it.

semi-optimism edit: in terms of actually successfully dealing with these kinds of thoughts, i just honestly ask myself if i really want to live/have lived the way it would take to acquire whatever skill i lack. sure, i might be jealous of the victor's success in the moment, but am i really jealous of the way they had to live to train hard enough to get that good? am i really jealous of the hours a day spent trying and failing over and over until improvement? would i rather have spent my time playing nothing but a single multiplayer game until i completely mastered it instead of experiencing a diverse array of different games? do i even want to have the same level of memorized map knowledge that renders a thrilling diegetic experience into a context-free standardized 'playing field'? do i really wish i spent all of my earlier years learning how to draw better or how to do complicated maths or program computers etc. instead of chilling and playing video games and having what scant few social experiences i could manage and studying a larger set of topics and hobbies? the answer to these questions is usually: not really. i might wish to retroactively spend my time on say, pursuing meaningful romantic relationshps instead of whatever i ended up actually doing, but not on 'more call of duty/halo/etc.'.