THE GAMES ARE FINALLY COMPLETE! New pledge manager launches August 1st.
8 months ago
– Tue, Jul 08, 2025 at 02:01:46 PM
Hi guys,
The exciting thing about being responsible when things go wrong is that I also get to be proud when something good happens!
The games are finally done!
All components are approved, produced, assembled, and shrink wrapped. They are getting loaded onto pallets and there's a pickup date scheduled for July 23rd. (I don't know why they can't be picked up immediately, but at least – after many years of pratfalls – we finally have a firm pickup date rather than just a fake estimation.)
I hired the same logistics manager, Justin, who has handled all of my freight (including for the original Chaosmos Kickstarter back in 2014). Trucks and freight ships are getting booked and scheduled. Justin is great. Our pickup is scheduled for Wednesday, July 23. Even if that shifts a few days, I expect the games will be be loaded onto a freighter within 5 days of that, and then there's a 5-6 week trip to the USA and an 8 week (!) journey to Europe (sorry Europe; geography strikes again). Then 2-3 more weeks for your orders to get shipped from those main hubs.
Pledge Manager August 1st!
As mentioned in previous updates, I decided to wait until the games are literally on boats before launching the new pledge manager. I will post multiple updates about the pledge manager, so don't worry right now about changing your address or checking your order; everything will need to go through the new pledge manager regardless. (Even if you already are satisfied with your order, the simple reality is that the game content changed when I switched manufacturers, and that affects both the content of the tiers and the shipping size and weight. These complexities are inconvenient, but we must at some point face them in order to successfully deliver the games.)
I'm going to set aside 5 pages (!) of text about shipping logistics and release that information with the next update; it isn't necessary until we are closer to the pledge manager launching on August 1st. Stay tuned!
-Joey
The rest of this update contains some scientific trivia about summer. I wrote 100% of this myself (no A.I. companion) because I enjoy investigating things that I don't fully understand – maybe some of you will enjoy reading about summer as much as I enjoyed researching it. (But... if you can go out and enjoy your summer, please do that and don't feel obligated to read this silly update.) If I made any errors, let me know. I don't plan on doing too many updates like this, but I was interested in this topic. You don't need to read this update unless you want to. This is what happens when I start to type a paragraph about summertime... imagine how long this update was going to be when it originally included information about shipping logistics!
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Enjoy a long summer!
The manufacturer was very slow completing assembly, but at least the games are finally done.
I promised delivery would begin before the end of summer. I still mean that.
Specifically, I said "You should have your copy by late summertime." And you still should. (Luckily, the word "should" gives me a bit of timeline latitude, as does the word "late," as does the word "summer.")
• When I refer to summer, I'm making the assumption you are in the 94% of backers who live in the Northern Hemisphere. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere (South America and Australia/NZ), then please forgive my error, and I hope you are enjoying winter. And stay safe – I saw in the news that Australia just had a series of "polar blasts," which sounds like a Chaosmos card. So when I say you should have your copy by late summer:
• I am not referring to school summer. For those of you who define the end of summer as the day when kids and teachers go back to school, I humbly disagree.
• I do not recognize Labor Day (the first Monday of September) as an official end of summer; that is an American holiday petitioned for by trade unions to take time off from work to host fundraisers and barbecues; it wasn't historically related to summer at all. (See the bottom of this post for a photo of the President who signed the bill into law, along with this clones.) Wikipedia says that in my home state of Virginia, the theme park Kings Dominion successfully lobbied for summer vacation to not end until after Labor Day – that way, theme parks could squeeze an extra week of ticket sales out of attendees. (And attend we did, by the way. King's Dominion featured a maze/haunt called Miner's Revenge, which featured... of course... a depiction of "the worst coal mine accident in history," featuring mannequins depicting mangled dead bodies.)
• I do not reference the dog days of summer, the 40 hot summer days (ending August 11th) when the brightest star – Sirius (the "dog star" of the Canis Major constellation) – rises with the sun. (Historically, this was when the Nile would flood; summer was tied to harvests. Therefore, Sirius being visible alongside the sun was entrenched in mythological meaning.) But, unfortunately, you are unlikely to receive your game prior to the end of the dog days of summer.
• I am also not referring to midsummer, which is marked by the specific day in June (21st or 22nd) with the longest amount of daylight (summer solstice), a variable caused by the Earth's axial tilt (the pole is tilted towards the sun) and many other orbital factors. The summer solstice is one universal, fixed moment that happens at the same moment in each yearly orbit. Northern Hemisphere folks experience the summer solstice while the Southern Hemisphere experiences winter solstice, and 6 months later they each experience the opposite. (Technically speaking, the Earth's tilt doesn't really change relative to the background stars – but relative to our sun during our orbit, the tilt matter a LOT. Different locations on the globe have different local experiences during summer solstice, including "Midnight Sun" festivals in Alaska and Svalbard, and many megaliths like Stonehenge have been designed to reveal light shafts and mark calendars during solstices. Summer solstice is the longest day, but I don't define "summer" as a time with the most amount of daylight... that phrase describes the summer solstice, but other seasons are also well lit – and of course summer nights are dark because of the Earth's spin. And the rays of "sunlight" on a summer day contains other forms of radiation besides visible light, including heat from the infrared spectrum. And the UV rays that we associate with summer sunburns are not technically on the visible spectrum either. So "the day with the longest amount of daylight" describes the summer solstice, and "midsummer" describes the middle of summer according to that but does NOT relate to my definition of summer, nor does it answer the question of when you will receive your games.
• Some people refer to astrological summer, which is the period between when the sun enters the zodiac of Cancer in June, and culminates when it enters Libra 3 months later. I don't know what any of that means. Something about how the constellations look in the sky. I don't have patience to study that. But supposedly this astrological summer is based on the astronomical summer... which I will return to shortly. It begins at the start of the summer solstice and culminates at the autumnal equinox (when the Earth's axis is aligned flat with the sun against the equator, so day and night are the same length). So the astrological implications (if any) don't have a bearing on when you'll receive your games... the dates might end up aligning...but weirdly, the 12 zodiac signs in astrology are not actually related to the 12 months or the 29.53-day moon phases that supposedly influenced the 30/31 day month. We live our lives dictated by arbitrary rules!
• Nor am I referring to solar summer (which ends in July or August when the region cools); it refers to a technical description of the months when your whole hemisphere receives the most sunlight. The Earth's tilt means that certain locations receive specific amounts of light on specific days; for example, 90 degree light is direct, concentrated light over a smaller area (with less atmospheric diffusion associated with an oblique angle). The amount of solar radiation that reaches us is not just due to the tilt of the Earth, clouds, and other atmospheric events; the Earth's spin matters as well, and many other variables like your latitude (closeness to the equator), the curve of the Earth's elliptical orbit ("eccentricity"), and the uneven spin (I was remembering this being called "eccentricity," but I just looked it up. Eccentricity is how far the orbit is from being a perfect circle. Wobble describes how Earth rotates like an imbalanced spinning top due to gravitational influence on our equator from the sun, moon, and other planets. (Plus, I imagine, the Earth's metallic core is not balanced perfectly like a bowling ball, so that probably figures into this at least a bit.) Over long periods of time (tens of thousands of years), the wobble apparently makes the axial tilt change by several degrees in one direction and then back again, so summers and winters were much more extreme back in the woolly mammoth days. Atmospheric effects trap heat from the rays of the sun, spread out across a larger plane, so the angle of incidence (solar angle) matters a lot. People who work in the solar panel industry probably know a lot more about solar zenith angles (and they might even know what the word "azimuth" means). The equator, of course, receives far more solar radiation than the poles, so your specific latitudinal variation (how close to the equator you are) matters as well. For example, during summer, the difference between temperature at the poles and the temperature at the equator shrinks because the angle of the sun's rays change in relation to the atmosphere, spreading out over a wider footprint over the globe, making the days longer. Nearer the poles, even though the light might not contain as much direct radiant heat as the equator, the amount of energy heating the that part of the Earth builds up because the days are longer there. Near the equator, you don't really experience seasons very much. So every day can feel like summer.
• Nor am I referring to thermal summer, which refers to the hottest days of the year (on average), which usually lags about a month behind solar summer (see above). Direct sunlight (more technically, increased solar irradiance) is not the sole variable that triggers the summer's heat wave. The ground and ocean is a giant heat sink, storing the heat energy and releasing it slowly as heat thermals. Interestingly, the hottest day of the year might not even be within thermal summer, since jet streams move heat around the polar front (where polar air hits tropical heated air or other thermals). Heat waves travel via something called Rossby waves and are affected by complex interactions including the west-to-east spin of the Earth. (Interestingly, large tornados in the Northern Hemisphere rotate counterclockwise and large tornadoes in the Southern Hemisphere spin the opposite direction, and this is tied to the Earth's spin via the Coriolis effect.)
• Nor am I referring to meteorological summer, which is the name that people use to conveniently describe the seasons as four batches of exactly three months each. But measuring summer splitting the months into four groupings (or even describing four specific seasons) is arbitrary. (By that metric, here in Los Angeles it is almost always summer.) Are there really four distinct seasons, or it that just a meteorological justification for the convenience of splitting the year into four groups of three months each?
• However... I AM referring to astronomical summer, which ends with the autumnal equinox, when the sun's rays are directly situated over the Earth's equator (i.e., the day and night are the same length). Astronomical summer is an objectively measurable phenomenon that has been recognized by most cultures around the world for thousands of years. It ends this year on September 22. So most backers should have their games by the end of summer, according to this definition. So let's enjoy an extra long summer! ~ 70% of customers will almost certainly receive their copies by the end of astronomical summer (unless the games get stuck in Customs). I'll give detailed estimates about each country's delivery dates in an upcoming update.
Side note: [cut from the primary post]:By the way... we all know that a day is based on a measurement of a full pirouette of the Earth, and a year is based on the (imperfect) measurement of a full orbit of the sun... and the tilt of the Earth does seem to create four seasons (at least for a large amount of points on the globe). And at least the four seasons can be justified by measuring the solstices and equinoxes.... But did you know that the "month" (containing 28/29/30/31 days) is not based on anything at all (other than possibly a vague approximation of a lunar cycle)? And even worse, the 7 day "week" is based on even less, other than a possible connection with the biblical creation story or the number of "wandering bodies" (planets) known at the time. The 365.25 day year makes sense, since a cosmic or mystical event created the length of the Earth's year, not some cleric somewhere.... But the fact that humans have weeks and months is crazy... 365.25 doesn't divide into 52 weeks of 7 days each, nor does it divide into 12 months, and so each month has to have some crazy amount of days to prevent calendar "drift."
An additional note about seasons [cut from the primary post]: When I was a kid I thought seasons had to do with how close Earth was to the heat of the sun in our orbit. But that's wrong.... As Kepler worked out in his second law, since an orbiting body is being pulled by gravity towards the mass it orbits, it moves faster the closer it gets – this is necessary for the orbit to remain stable. The Earth goes around the sun in an ellipse-shaped orbit – not a perfect circle. And due to the Earth's tilt, specific hemispheres of the Earth are pointed at the sun at various times during this journey (this creates our seasons). Technically, the Earth's distance to the sun changes up to 3 percent throughout the year because we orbit the sun in an ellipse rather than a circle. But this distance doesn't affect the heat of our summers very much because the Earth spends less time being near the sun and more time far away at the other end of the ellipse. At the perihelion (the moment each January when the Earth is closest to the sun), the Northern Hemisphere happens to be tilted away from the sun, and the mostly-ocean Southern Hemisphere easily absorbs the increased (6% stronger) spikes of solar radiation. But these complicated orbital dynamics are why the Northern Hemisphere experiences a shorter winter season than the Southern Hemisphere, and, in turn, our Northern Hemisphere summers are 3–4 days longer than Southern Hemisphere summers! This is because our hemisphere is tilted towards the sun for a longer amount of time (during that period in the ellipse away from the perihelion and closer to the aphelion (the longest distance from the sun). Your latitude (distance to the equator) doesn't change (if you stay put), but the Earth's relative angle toward the sun's rays change throughout the year (due to the Earth's tilt). The closer you are to the equator (the tropics) the smaller the effect the Earth's tilt has on the sun's angle to you, so your days and nights are about the same length as each other, and your summers are not particularly different from the other seasons. But if you are further from the equator during summertime, your days are longer, so your location is receiving longer amounts of solar radiation and heat over the course of the longer day. You aren't receiving as much direct sunlight/radiation, but you are receiving it for a longer amount of time, and that energy is absorbed by oceans and rocks, contributing to your summer climate.
Trivia about Grover Cleveland: Cleveland signed the bill into law that recognized Labor Day as a national holiday... (before Canada stole the idea and copied our holiday). Now, many people consider Labor Day the unofficial end to summer. Cleveland was friends with Teddy Roosevelt before they were each U.S. Presidents. But here's the crazy thing I noticed when I reading about Cleveland: He looks exactly like Roosevelt! I literally can't tell them apart other than the glasses. And in the third image, Cleveland and Roosevelt are standing next to another guy named Francis... these are not triplets or clones, these are three separate people in 1903.
