Salem for Nerds E01 - Amazing Spermwhales!

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Salem for Nerds Proves The Earth is Round Part 1 of 2

Postby Nye_Billson » Wed Dec 30, 2020 8:03 pm

Salem for Nerds Proves The Earth is Round part 1 of 2

I’d venture a guess that the Salem Round Earth Society, Or SRES, needs no introduction. Moderators have done a fantastic job of deleting their posts as they pop up but who here hasn’t had one of their posts derailed by SRES into an argument over whether the devs coded Salem to be flat or not?

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Or who hasn’t hasn’t been recommended one of their many YouTube videos which always seems to just be someone’s weird uncle rambling semi-incoherently about round Salem in the front seat of his truck, out of earshot of his wife, for 45 minutes?

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And like you, I’ve always written off their arguments as misguided pseudo-science at best. I mean what developer in their right mind would actually spend the countless hours to code mechanics simulating a round earth for a game that takes place on less than 1% of it’s surface? SRES’s response has always been the same, “Salem has never had normal devs.”

Hi I’m Nye Billson, host of Salem for Nerds, and in today’s episode we prove that Salem is in fact is round.

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I know what you are thinking, you’re thinking that I’m crazy, that I can’t possibly taking the SRES’s argument’s seriously. Well everyone but Marp, we all know what that horny devil is thinking right now.

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To the rest of you tho, I applaud you being skeptical. Fellow nerds and scientists alike I say being skeptical is a skill to be proud of. Big claims require big proof. But like a partner telling you that “he’s just a friend from work” the proof is there, you just have to be brave enough to look.

To start I need to explain Angle of Insolation. The quick and dirty explanation is that light shining on a round surface will hit that surface at different angles. Light hits the earth most direct near the equator and least directly near the poles.
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Author’s Note: I made this gif to explain the concept better, but for budgetary reasons my editor removed the animation so you’ll have to use your imaginations a little.
Editor’s Note: No, you stole this image from online somewhere and just drew “motion” lines on it.

“That’s all well and good but how can you check for angle of incidence in a game that doesn’t even have a sun?” You might ask, or if you’re Becky, “Why were you checking my phone while I was in the shower?” The answer you both is science.

Let’s take a look at the implications of the Angle of Insolation. For the equator, being hit with more direct light means there is more heat energy over a smaller area meaning it’s hotter, whereas the poles are the opposite, less direct light means less heat energy and that means it’s colder.
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In fact looking at this graph of average yearly temperature by latitude you can see that between 16 degrees and 90 degrees the temperature falls relatively linearly. Keep in mind of course temperature is a fickle mistress, she’ll get you into some weird stuff and leave you for some guy at work and now you have to find a way to mention as casually as possible during every match.com date that you can only get hard when someone puts their feet in your mouth.
Editors Note: I believe what the author is *trying* to say here is that temperature is not fixed and can vary quite a lot so certain assumptions and simplifications have been made to keep this episode a reasonable length.

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Because Angle of Insolation affects the planet latitudinally, NOT longitudinally, in order to prove Salem is round we need to verify two assumptions: 1 that temperature decreases relatively linearly as we head north. The second is that temperature stays essentially constant east to west. If we find anything different than that we have only proved temperature is a mess, simply a self-harm mechanism solely meant to drive away potential new players, not the brilliant code work of a mad genius devoted to bringing us an earthly realism not seen in any other mmorpgs that we hope it is.

To prove our assumptions Salem for Nerds sent a team of scientists to Providence.

Materials Needed:
1x Canoe
1x Coldsnap
1x As many clothing combinations of thermal as possible.
10x Liters of Meat broth.
Like 130x Silver Pieces

The first part of the experiment is relatively simple. Sail north from Providence wearing the lowest possible thermal rating to avoid hypothermia. If the first assumption is correct hypothermia should set in as soon as the temperature drops a degree. When that happens I will change my clothes to be a single thermal value higher, drink meat broth to reset my body temperature, and then continue sailing north until it happens again. Repeat until the pattern has been discovered or the assumption dis-proven.

This Coldsnap the minimum thermal required to avoid hypothermia in Providence was 38, so outfits up to 48 were assembled.
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The second half is even simpler - as there exist 3x fast travel ports, Providence, Limer’s Front, and Isle of Nod, all on the same latitude I can wear the minimum thermal rating to avoid hypothermia in Providence and travel to the other ports to see if the same thermal rating is enough there.

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Temperature falls linearly as we get closer to the north pole:
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Temperature drops indicated by pink dots, linear pattern of 1 degrees every 10 tiles north.
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Temperature remains the same along and east - west parallel:
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No hypothermia at all three locations at 38 thermal.
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With our results in hand we reached out to the mods for comment:

John Carver:
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Marp:
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Meow:
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With a round Salem proved any reasonable scientist would stop here. But like a developer contemplating whether or not to code solar incidence into a survival farming game, or a man drunk texting his ex girlfriend in the middle of the night, simply knowing its a waste of time won’t be enough to stop you. What I’m saying is that we can take this a step farther, one step closer to understanding JC’s so called “Round Earth Madness.” Also, Becky, if you’re reading this, DID YUO EVERLVOE ME?! oR WAS IT ALL JuST AaLIE?!!!

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of Salem for Nerds, where we use the data we collected here to calculate the size of the of the planet Salem is on!

Editor’s Note: After the original airing of this episode this thread was bombarded with very rude and condescending posts from the SRES account. Although Salem for Nerds supports free speech, due to the sheer number, and graphic nature, of the posts moderator Dallane was asked to step in. We were later informed that because of an escalation that happened behind the scenes, the SRES account has since been banned and removed from the forum entirely. Remember fellow nerds, it is not alway enough to be right, as scientists we also have to prove we are correct for the right reasons.
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Re: Salem for Nerds E04 - Proof The Earth is Round Part 1

Postby Taipion » Wed Dec 30, 2020 8:33 pm

I hate to say you're wrong, but it's not round, because since long ago already we know...

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Need something? Here is my Shop (Including some useful info for new/returning players at the bottom of the first post)
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Re: Salem for Nerds E04 - Proof The Earth is Round Part 1

Postby belgear » Thu Dec 31, 2020 7:57 am

I'm not sure whether I want Nye Bilson's name tattooed on my inner thigh, my lower back, or just directly on my ***** so that I may think about him when I look at it.
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Proof The Earth is Round Part 2

Postby Nye_Billson » Wed Jan 06, 2021 5:31 am

Salem for Nerds Proves The Earth is Round part 2 of 2

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Legally I am not allowed to talk about what John Carver did. No one is. But we all know what happened the night on that fateful May night in 2018. The question everyone has had though, is not what, but why. Personally I've poured over the court records asking myself that question over and over again. During sentencing, Federal prosecutors even offered him a slightly reduced sentence if he would just tell them why he did what he did and he turned them down.

When the case was still in the news there was no shortage of theories on Reddit. I must admit as I was not into Salem at the time and I wrote the whole thing off as just the actions of a crazy man. Surely the sheer amount of feces and pig semen at crime scene proved that. However there was one photo of some of the writing at the crime scene that stuck out to me so much so that I held on to it.

I hope I'm not breaking any forum rules by posting this. I'm sure everyone has already seen it on the news before.

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Shortly after the sentencing people began to lose intrest in John Carver and I even forgot about that photo entirely until I was working on the Pig Death of the Universe episode.
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It reminded me of a number from that photo. Later that night when I finally did take the time to dig up that old photo I laughed; it wasn’t even that close, some 900 numbers off, barely even worthy of calling a coincidence. Looking back on it now I’m not even sure why I made that connection but I can tell you that I regret, regret with the utmost of my being, finding up that photo. I fully believe that had I not made it fresh in my mind I would not have gone down the terrible path I have.

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Last episode we showed how the hidden values coded for hypothermia mimic precisely what we would expect to see for solar angle of incidence and which could only exist if Salem is round. I could have left it there but with that photo fresh in my mind and my curiosity peaked I reached out to the devs for more information. Only Meow took me seriously enough to respond.
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But when I pushed further she did not respond at all. Going back to the public records I saw her official sworn affidavit has her saying this:
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It was a shock to those paying attention to the case when John opted to forgo a lawyer or consul and choose rather to represent himself during the trial. He never called any of his own witnesses, or even questioned those the prosecution called. He just sat silently, smirking occasionally at statements made by witnesses, or evidence called into the court. But at Meow’s mention of trans-Neptunian objects JC broke into a fully toothy grin.

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I had intended for the round Earth episode to be only one part but at the last moment decided to extend it so I could calculate the size of the planet Salem was on. Was it Earth or somewhere else I wondered. Looking back on it now I’m not quite sure why I would have thought it wouldn’t be Earth. 

The math was mostly done already. In our original experiment we established that the temperature dropped 1 degree for every 10 tiles, or since tiles are 100 meters long, 1 degree for every kilometer. We simply needed to compare that to Earth to work out the finial pieces of the equation. 
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I rushed through the final calculations almost feverishly. It was like I was being pushed, no perhaps more like pulled forwards, but to what I did not know. When I came to the final result I stopped in a cold sweat.

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Surely this was a coincidence. But as I told myself I would have to keep going to make sure, something deeper inside me, something more primal, was screaming at me to stop. It was well past midnight but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I could put my mind to rest. I googled Eris. Eris was the greek goddess of strife and discord and also a trans-Neptunian object. This was no surprise as it had been mentioned several times during the trial. What the prosecution couldn’t make at the time was how Eris was connected to the number 175.

I read on. Apparently Eris was once known as Planet X, the mysterious tenth planet, before new astronomical conventions changed the rules on what was a planet or not.  Deeper into the research I found mention of a moon Dysnomia, the Greek goddess of anarchy and lawlessness. Even deeper, my eyes red with sleeplessness, I found why no one could link that number to Eris, in 2018, right around the time of the trial, new research came out that changed the accepted size of Dysnomia. Before that, when JC was still coding Salem, Dysnomia was thought to be between 100 and 250 km in diameter, or exactly 175…
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The pieces were coming together. Surely Eris and Dysnomia being goddesses of strife, discord, and lawlessness was no mere coincidence. Nor was it dumb luck that Dysnomia rotates around Eris once every 15 days, about the same time it takes for Salem to cycle its seasons. There exits even now a fringe cult centered on Eris, Discordianism, worshipers of their one true god, chaos. Is Salem, with all its issues and broken mechanics an intentional monument to chaos? I felt like I was going mad. I felt closer to JC than I had ever wanted to be, like he was starting to make sense. Was it on a whim or because I already knew the answer that I looked back at that first number 795150? How long before we aired that episode did he write on that wall? 

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I don’t know what to think anymore. Was he trying to warn us? Did he do those terrible and disgusting things he went to jail for because he was trying to stop it, or was he trying to speed it up? 

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As I write this to send to my editor I don’t even feel like myself anymore. One question still burns in my mind, pulling at end the loose ends of my consciousness, fraying them apart. If Dysnomia is Salem what is Eris? I know in that answer is the reason why we have Blood Moons. Why so many people play Salem only to mysteriously disappear, never to be heard of again, and why those of us who remain can never fully quit. And just maybe, the answer to why JC left. I can’t stop now, I have to press on further. I have to know the truth. No matter how horrifying, I need to know the truth.
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Editors Note: We haven’t heard from the author for several weeks now despite reaching out to him multiple times. My guess is that he just don’t know what to nerd out on for the second season yet. So while we generate ideas enjoy other great forum content, like the endless debate on whether Salem is dead or not, or I believe pistolshrimp mentioned he’d like to start doing movie reviews again.  Feel free to contact him with any ideas of topics for Salem for Nerds to research and he will send them to us. Thanks for watching.
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Re: Salem for Nerds E05 - Season 1 Finale Round Salem pt 2

Postby MarpTarpton » Thu Jan 07, 2021 12:15 am

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Procne wrote: Devs have again proven that they dont give a crap about untalented and lazy players.
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Re: Salem for Nerds E05 - Season 1 Finale Round Salem pt 2

Postby Nye_Billson » Thu Jan 07, 2021 5:30 am

Editors Note: Recently I was sent a mysterious package containing scientific instruments to pass along to Professor Billson to further his research. What comes to mind is something Professor Billson just said in the last episode:
Nye_Billson wrote:Did he do those terrible and disgusting things he went to jail for because he was trying to stop it, or was he trying to speed it up?


Whatever the motives I can say we are thrilled and thank your for you patronage and the Professor is excited to get to work. Now if I can only find him again...


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Amazing Spermwhales

Postby Nye_Billson » Sat Jan 30, 2021 1:46 am

Amazing Spermwhales!

At first the fame of having a hit thread with hundreds of views was great. Women wanted to be me and men wanted to be in me, or something like that. For once my ex called and left a message for me rather than the other way around. She must have been embarrassed tho because she used a fake accent and made up some story about offering better rates on internet than other local providers. Also the number she left connected me to India, but point is I could tell it was her. I was on top of the world. Even the NPCs seemed nicer to me.
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I had guest appearances...
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And product sponsorship...
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Editor's Note: Marshmallows were removed "temporarily" in 2018 so they could be made more tasty and then never added back.

I was constantly Full & Fed Up and Quenched & Quaffed off my ass. Kuku offered to send me bikini pics, which I later learned was just how she starts all conversations, but it still felt nice. I was living the life of a rockstar scientist and I was loving it. But like cotton candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or not abiding by the 10 second rule with chokeplay, it’s possible to take things too far.

For the briefest of moments I stopped thinking about science all together. I told myself it was so I could forget the things I had learned about Round Salem, but in my heart I knew I was slipping, getting lazy. Rock bottom for me was when DMing on Tinder and a woman asked “What’s your sign?” and I answered “Virgo” uncritically, without even telling her about the lack of evidence which correlates personality to any constellations. I sat there for a long time, wondering what kind of person I had become, and also periodically checking if she was going to send those nudes I asked for. It was a dark place to be.

And like the appeal of missionary position after realizing why safe words are a thing, after taking things too far and hitting rock bottom I wanted to return to the basics. It was at this point my memories returned to a more innocent time when to me the pinnacle of science was a two page spread of animal facts in National Geographic for Kids and part of me wanted to capture some of that naive wonder at the possibilities of science and naive wonder for the world coded around us.

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Welcome to the second season of Salem for Nerds. The show where you should end each episode with less functional knowledge of Salem and in its place more childlike awe at the coding efforts that go on behind the scenes to make Salem a dynamic game. Either that or frustration and a slow sad head shaking at what could have been. I’ll settle for that too. As always I’m your host, Nye Billson, and today we are going to look at wildlife biology in Salem.

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In Salem, like in most games really, animals are generally looked at as simply resources. I wanted to try something different. Wildlife biology is a weird sort of science, for one its frustratingly close to environmental science, but instead of looking at an entire living system wildlife biologists may spend an entire lifetime studying a single organism only to have their research condensed to a short blurb accompanying the runner up category for a top ten list of most interesting animals. And with so many species going extinct so fast choosing to be a wildlife biologist is like seeing a group of teenagers beating up a homeless man and taking pictures of the flowers behind them - knowing the mating habits of such and such beetle is going to do jack to help it when some company is destroying thousands of acres of its habitat every year.

But I don’t want to dog on wildlife biology too much. There is something almost childlike and relatable about wanting to watch animals all day. Even in Salem there are hints that animals live their own lives outside of interaction with us. I mean I’ve stopped to watch, or directly caused, animals to fight each other more times than I can count and it almost never gets old. So while there are plenty of animals in Salem that might be fun to research in the true spirit of wildlife biology I wanted to narrow it down to just one. And perhaps it was because of a desire for a symbolic rebirth, or just because I’ve been thinking about mouths a lot lately, but my mind went to whales.

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Armed with the tools of a wildlife biologist, like rocks and wallpaper, I set out with a few of my closest friends to find a whale where we tested and recorded everything I could think of.
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Additionally during the process I was contacted by fellow wildlife biologist Goodman.
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And then I learned that wildlife biology is not without its dangers as sadly my dear friend Whale Alt 1 died in a tragic accident.

Unfortunately I cannot share all our discoveries as some of them are potentially exploitable, but overall it was a great way to get back to my roots as a scientist and re-humble myself in the face of the sheer strokes of genius intermixed with the sheer strokes of wtf decisions that make up Salem.

Editor's Note: This episode is dedicated to Whale Alt 1.
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