Postmarks

:root {
--background-top: #2d3238;
--background-rest: #2d3238;
--navbar-color: #2a2f35;
--post-color: #383c42;
--post-outline-color: #2a2f35;
--label-color: #383c42;
--box-border-color: #2a2f35;
--highlighted-post-color: #41454d;
--highlighted-post-outline-color: #6ba65d;
--board-title: #ffffff;
--font-color: #ffffff;
--name-color: #c5c8c6;
--subject-color: #6ba65d;
--link-color: #6ba65d;
--post-link-color: #6ba65d;
--link-hover: #8bc27a;
--input-borders: #2a2f35;
--input-color: #ffffff;
--input-background: #2d3238;
--greentext-color: #6ba65d;
--title-color: #6ba65d;
--hr: #2a2f35;
--accent-color: #6ba65d;
}
body, html {
background: #2d3238 !important;
color: #ffffff !important;
}
a, a:visited {
color: #6ba65d !important;
}
a:hover {
color: #8bc27a !important;
}
.post-container, .catalog-tile, .pages, .navbar, .stickynav, #livetext, #threadstats {
background: #383c42 !important;
border-color: #2a2f35 !important;
color: #ffffff !important;
}
.post-info {
background: transparent !important;
border-bottom: 1px solid #2a2f35 !important;
}
.board-title, h1, h2, .p-title-value {
color: #ffffff !important;
font-weight: 600;
}
.post-subject, .name, .quote, .replylink {
color: #6ba65d !important;
}
input, textarea, select, button {
background: #2d3238 !important;
color: #ffffff !important;
border: 1px solid #2a2f35 !important;
}
button, input[type="submit"] {
background: #383c42 !important;
color: #6ba65d !important;
}
.post-container:hover, .catalog-tile:hover {
background: #41454d !important;
}
hr {
border-color: #2a2f35 !important;
}
div.post.reply {
background: #383c42;
border-color: #42464d;
}

I’ve been rethinking what s&box should look like over the past couple of weeks. The platform is not well liked, it doesn’t have good retention. I’m embarrassed by our reviews, I am ashamed. Listening to all the negative feedback, absorbing, taking it seriously and deciding what we should and shouldn’t be doing. It’s not a big secret that it hasn’t been going well.

Our focus has been on the engine and the development experience. That’s what we love, that’s what turns us on - but we’re not selling an engine, we’re selling a game. So we need to do much much better on the game, we need to shift our focus to what players are experiencing, not developers.

Part of this focus is drawing our attention to the Sandbox Game. Giving it parity with the Garry’s Mod version and surpassing it. Showing everyone what the engine can do, adding more NPCs, adding vehicles, offering a first class multiplayer experience, supporting addons and customization. This is a relatively easy task - but I’ve let everyone down that was expecting that. I accept that, and I’m sorry - we are going to do better.

We’re fully removing the Citizen. We tried to make it work for about a year longer than we should have (see below).

We have been struggling with discovery a lot. Which games to show, which to hide. Then AI came along and made that much much harder, because suddenly it’s very easy to knock out a game. The player is overwhelmed by choice. They’re presented with a few good games surrounded by a ton of shit games. They choose a game, it takes a while to download, and it’s immediately shit. How many times will they try games until they find one they like.

My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work. It’s not feasible. It’s not how people discover games. You can’t land people on a menu of 60 games and say have fun. That’s not a good experience. People want to find games through recommendations, through active multiplayer games, through watching streamers, influencers and content creators. We have been coming at it from the wrong direction.

We shouldn’t strive to be a platform with the most games available. We should strive to be a platform with the best, most popular games available. Where good taste and great opinions are valued beyond everything else. This is a very human thing, this isn’t something that can be replaced by AI, ever.

This is why we’re changing the Play Fund to an opinionated approval system instead of something everyone can just enrol themselves in (see below).

We have spent a lot of time making our own backend, our own version of workshop. I’m arriving at the conclusion that this has mostly been a waste of time and resources. It has been fun to make, but we should be shaping everything into fitting into the Steam Workshop as much as possible.

We intend to go free to play towards the end of the year. It’s been pointed out that we are charging for access and also have skins for sale. I don’t think that’s too unusual nowadays, but I can totally understand how combined with everything else that it’s a big turn off. We don’t need the entrance fee, we need players. Our intention always was to go free to play eventually, so fuck it, lets just do it now. Everyone who has paid for the game will automatically get a bunch of exclusive steam inventory items (extra if you bought it at $20 vs $10) that I hope will justify the purchase price.

I love seeing people create things, I love this engine, and I love working on it. The negative reviews hurt me. The disdain for the project hurts me. I don’t like letting people down, especially when they’ve given me money to provide a service. I understand it all and we’re making some big sweeping changes to try to improve things. Please bear with us while we make these changes.

‘Furious’ judge halts tree removal, demands answers on Trump’s D.C. golf plan​

The judge lambasted the Trump administration for ignoring her repeated pleas not to work on the historic East Potomac course: “There’s no excuse for this.”

A “furious” federal judge excoriated the Trump administration Monday morning for cutting down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, the historic course eyed for redevelopment by President Donald Trump, telling government lawyers they had cost their credibility by ignoring her repeated warnings to give notice before work continued.

Government lawyers told U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes at an emergency hearing that approximately 430 trees were removed Saturday and that another 299 are still targeted for removal. Reyes ordered the government to stop cutting down trees until at least 2 p.m. Tuesday and said she would require 72 hours’ notice before any future work that would permanently alter the course.

Reyes said she had been reluctant to issue a temporary restraining order in the case. But, she added, “I have no faith that the government isn’t going to cut them down unless there’s an order in place not to do so.”

Violating her order “by two seconds” would prompt contempt proceedings, the judge said.

“I am thoroughly unamused right now,” Reyes said as the hearing began. “I do not know how I could have made it any plainer. I did not want what happened to happen.”

At one point, Justice Department attorney Marissa Ann Piropato told Reyes that government lawyers “did our best” to keep the court apprised of any construction work at the course.

“No, you did not do your best,” Reyes responded, her voice rising. “You did your absolute worst.”

The hearing followed an emergency request filed late Sunday by preservationists seeking to stop the National Park Service from removing additional trees at the historic public golf course. The D.C. Preservation League and two golfers allege that the administration is racing ahead with irreversible work while avoiding the environmental and historic-preservation reviews required for the president’s proposed transformation of East Potomac into a championship-level course.

Reyes said she had repeatedly trusted government lawyers’ assurances that the court and plaintiffs would receive notice before major or irreversible work began. The government filed its notice at 4:55 p.m. Friday before a holiday weekend, roughly 12 hours before crews began cutting.

“I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” Reyes said. “On what universe did anyone in your offices think that that was acceptable?”

Piropato acknowledged that government lawyers had learned as early as last Wednesday that the tree-cutting operation could begin Saturday. She said that attorneys were still gathering details and that there had been no “conscious decision” to withhold notice.
“Ignorance is not an excuse here,” Reyes responded. “There’s no excuse for this.”

The judge noted that she had said at an earlier hearing that she did not want even 10 trees removed without notice. She said she had resisted the plaintiffs’ previous requests for a formal restraining order because she trusted the government to honor the expectations she had repeatedly laid out.

“More than just being upset and furious right now, I’m just beyond disappointed in the government,” Reyes said. “I have done everything humanly possible to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this case.”

The government has maintained that the tree cutting is unrelated to the proposed overhaul of the historic golf course, while the plaintiffs accuse the administration of disingenuously treating early steps toward that larger project as stand-alone maintenance.

Reyes pressed the government to explain why a tree-cutting plan that had sat dormant for years suddenly had to be executed over a holiday weekend. Piropato initially said she did not know. National Mall and Memorial Parks Superintendent Kevin Griess told the court that the Park Service had only recently obtained the money and personnel needed to carry out a tree-removal program outlined in a 2019 cultural-landscape report. He said the workforce became available through a Park Service staffing surge connected to the nation’s 250th anniversary.


Griess said he submitted a tree-management plan to the National Park Service’s director Oct. 5 and received approval the next day. He said he did not know how much the tree cutting is costing NPS. Unlike in previous rounds of tree removal, he said, none of those cut down Saturday had been identified as hazardous or as posing a safety risk.

“This plan isn’t just about safety,” Griess testified. “It’s about the restoration of the park to its original state as a links golf course.”


Griess also testified that he has not seen or been briefed on any internal plan for Trump’s proposed redevelopment of the golf course. He said everything he knows about that proposal has come from social media.


The judge expressed concern about how quickly the government moved, given that two NPS officials testified Monday there was no urgency to remove the trees. She ordered Gregory Wischer, deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department, and National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron to testify when the hearing resumes Oct. 19 about why the cutting began Saturday and when the plan was first conceived. The judge said she was trying to determine whether the government had made “multiple misrepresentations” about the timing, notice and nature of the work — not merely whether a specific order had been violated.


An Interior Department spokesperson did not respond directly to questions or address the plaintiffs’ assertions but said in a statement: “NPS recognizes the importance of trees to the park and its visitors. This carefully planned work is part of our required stewardship of the park.”
In filing the request Sunday night, the plaintiffs cast the cutting as part of the administration’s broader push to remake the course.

“This is a tactic we’ve seen before from the Trump-Vance administration — act quickly to irrevocably alter a cherished national landmark, just to advance another one of President Trump’s pet vanity projects,” said Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs. “We are asking the court to act quickly before further unnecessary damage is done to a jewel of our national park system.”

The number of fallen trees presented in court Monday represents a dramatic expansion of the work the government outlined just a few days earlier.
In a sworn declaration filed Friday, Griess said crews would begin Saturday by removing 169 trees. An additional 90 were expected to follow, and field inspections could bring the eventual total to 529.

The plaintiffs said they intend to follow Sunday’s emergency request with a motion for a preliminary injunction. Their immediate argument is based on the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental consequences of major actions before committing resources or making irreversible decisions.

Trump has tapped prominent golf architect Tom Fazio to transform the century-old public facility into a championship-caliber course that the president says could host major tournaments. The administration, however, continues to describe the redesign in court filings as a “potential project” and has not released a final design, cost, funding plan or construction schedule.

The plaintiffs accuse the administration of improperly “segmenting” the East Potomac work — dividing a larger undertaking into smaller projects and evaluating each separately, rather than considering the cumulative effects of the proposed golf course overhaul.

Reyes has previously warned the administration to provide enough notice for the court to act before irreversible work begins, while making clear that she did not intend to become the course’s tree police. “I am not the Lorax. I do not speak for the trees. I am a judge,” she said at a September hearing.

(A)(A)