atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter rss same thing
buttondown.com/atomicthumbs/rss
Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
<a href="https://wolf.observer/88x31"><img src="https://wolf.observer/images/wolf-88x31.png" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a>
forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
forest.stream/
bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

AugustSun
@AugustSun

Most competitive games have some sort of high skill cap class or character that, in the hands of the right person, is an absolute menace that provides a stupid amount of value for the team if played right but fully takes the L HARD when not. Even more devious games give this class a particular ability kit or equipment to further differentiate them from everyone else, making the unique value incredibly apparent when applied correctly.

In Space Station 13, everyone has a job on the station, from basic assistants to cargo technicians, all the way to virologists. All of them have varying degrees of responsibility and access to different parts of the station depending on their role so that different hierarchies can get where they need to in order to do their jobs.

Enter: The Clown. The clown is different.


The clown is expected to be the actual station jokester, providing morale to the station or just generally being obnoxious by doing things like slipping people so they fall over, or telling bad jokes, or spraying them with their trick spraying flower. Oftentimes, this also means that they'll attempt to break into other areas of the station, or simply request an enhanced level of access to bother everyone else.

Another difficult point for clowns is that, as the clown, the station generally condones using you as a punching bag; no one's going to outright kill you unless you do something, but they might slip you back or hit you with a stun baton.

However.

GOOD clowns are a force to be reckoned with. SS13 allows a LOT of latitude in the actions you can take, and this is magnified by the nature of the clown. Your PDA communicator can slip people, meaning that if someone steps on it, they fall over. Falling over in SS13 means you get the shit kicked out of you in combat. Additionally, other tools (like your spray flower) can be filled with things that are lethal to enemies; imagine a clown with giant honking shoes runs up to you, says a dumb joke, then sprays you in the face with corrosive acid. It's possible!

Moreover, the nature of the clown means no one can expect what you're up to, not without seeing it themselves. You COULD be the bumbling idiot, or you could be the deadliest member of the crew, able to hack doorlocks, pickpocket command access IDs and tripping people to throw them in a locker, welding them in and throwing them into the vacuum of space.

Space Station 13 is, in effect, the diametric opposite of Among Us in complexity, but has the same core design ethos, meaning there are, in fact, antagonists. Namely, there are traitors, and with them traitor versions of each class. If you're a traitor and you have a specific class, you can purchase items that are specific to your class.

The clown's items? An actual clown car, a trick gun, and chameleon bombs.

Chameleon bombs are effectively pipebombs that you can disguise as items, and when picked up explode after a time. Then there's the trick revolver; ordinarily, clowns cannot use firearms. They will fail or miss horribly, EXCEPT for the trick revolver, which works perfectly in the clown's hands but if used by anyone else, blows the head off of the attempted user. Finally, the clown car. Traitor clowns will only use this at the last moment as having one makes you an obvious traitor, but you can knock people unconscious/run them over and stuff them in the clown car trunk, and there's no limit to how many you can carry. If you manage to crash the clown car with a lot of people in the trunk, they have a HIGH likelihood of straight up dying (though some servers frown on this).

The clown generally has a lot of flexibility in how their actions are perceived, depending on how strict the server is; if the station is about to be taken over by nuclear operatives looking to blow up the station, then they generally have a lot more lenience if they, say, cause a singularity to run loose that consumes most of the station, but also kills the nukies.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Space Station 13 is a special game to me that I love dearly, and I believe it's a master class in a game that almost entirely advocates for player agency and thus, emergent narrative.


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in reply to @AugustSun's post:

i'm a goonstation admin and (absentee) host of monkestation, funny to see ss13 here

there's one clown on goon that goes by noot, sometimes people post his horrible monstrosity art on the r/ss13 reddit. he never posts it himself

he regularly finds new and innovative ways to abuse the game engine. absolute legend

his casual disregard for monkey npcs is the most ss13 possible. if you haven't seen it he just uses a monkey vendor into an enclosed pen with a transposed particle field, that eats the monkey and drops all of its organs on the ground

it's fascinating in that :stonklol: kind of way

Reading about it is what drew me to learning how to play, you'd be surprised how much fun you can have even just a cargo tech (especially when it means starting a Cargonia revolution or wrapping someone in a package and sending it through pipes to the captain's office)

y'know i've thought about playing ss13 but i don't really know where to start. doesn't help that i am sensitive to rejection so i am deathly afraid to play the game wrong which is why i haven't even booted up the game yet :x

You can choose to not ever be a traitor and pick a role that doesn't have a lot of demand like staff assistant, miner or janitor. That lets you learn the ropes and reduces your official duties to "get to evacuation if needed"

There are some AMAZING developers still working at it, including a code compiler that effectively translates BYOND code to workable code outside of the engine (I think some variation of C). Which in effect would mean you could feed entire codebases through and make it into a workable codebase for SS14 and getting around the massive hardware hamstring that comes with BYOND! Super exciting!

oh hey it's Pinkie Pie. you never know whether she's completely useless or even deliberately sandbagging for fun, or alternatively a combat improv powerhouse complete with witty jokes, or even going far off the deep end and destroying everything.

Somehow, the clown is also the more narrowed down version of the Assistant in terms of Sheer Chaos; you know the minimum level of chaos to expect with a clown, but with an Assistant? Anything goes. They could be someone who legitimately is trying to learn the first steps, or they could be John Wick, ready to table and ziptie you at a moment's notice, then off to steal the Nuke Disk.