(Because this is the Internet, add a /s to the end of the previous message for full comprehension.)

What kind of a maniac comments Makefiles? It was hard to set up, so it should be hard to read and alter, dammit!

Alipay.

That's what it does.

What is the intent? WHY does it do this?

I'm baffled as to what the entire point of this is.

I don't get it. What's it supposed to do beyond making me repeat letters? Do you have something that actually explains the intent somewhere?

Any chance of you clarifying what "LPT" means here? Which of these: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/LPT

Best for what purpose?

There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.

For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it's not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn't a waste of effort.

Further, Esperanto is ignored because it's not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world's population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.

Learn a few languages from places that aren't Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases ... not even declining by count. Then consider:

1. Esperanto has almost all of these alien-to-many concepts; and,
2. While it is true that it is more regular in these than in natural Indo-European languages, the latter have the benefit of actually having speakers: the purpose of learning a foreign language is met: communication.

On top of this:

1. Esperanto has a consonant-heavy phonetic inventory, making its pronunciation hard for a lot of speakers of other languages. (It is painfully obvious that Zamenhoff was Polish, let's put it this way.) Too it is very bizarrely irregular (though it's not so bizarre once you check out Zamenhoff's native dialect and its consonantal inventory...). Lest you think this isn't a problem, most native languages in the world rarely present more than "consonant+vowel" structures, so strings of consonants are absolutely horrendously difficult for them. (Even saying "string" is hard, and that's mild compared to some of the atrocities of PolishEsperanto.
2. Esperanto uses a system of affixes (pre- and suf-) to words to modify word forms and attach meanings. This is a difficult concept for speakers of languages like Mandarin, say, to comprehend (where word forms are notoriously vague and grammatical particles are used in place of affixes to accomplish many of the same things). Further, Esperanto assumes that a) word forms are universal, b) that the categories in those languages that have them are the same, and c) that even when the categories are the same individual words are categorized similarly across languages. Yet in English "angry" is an adjective. In other languages it is a verb. Fancy that!
3. Esperanto has the single most useless feature of any language: gendered declensions. (And, naturally, just to add icing to this cake, the default is masculine.) Zamenhoff had the chance to remove the single most useless feature of a language from his grammar ... and didn't. Flipping FARSI managed to do this, a natural language in the Indo-European family, but a constructed language had to keep this vestigial nonsense?! Again, gendered grammar is not even slightly universal and makes the language difficult to learn for people coming from sane languages.
4. Esperanto's lexical inventory is gloriously East European for the most part, with random slathering of Romance-language vocabulary generously applied. So, you know, using as a basis words from a small geographical region instead of words from around the world. Where are the Chinese roots? The Arabic ones? The roots from various African languages? There aren't any. Thus it is pretty much equally difficult for a Chinese(or Arabic(or, say, Swahili))-speaking student to learn the lexicon of an actual language spoken by actual people instead of a toy language spoken by basically nobody.
5. What is a subjunctive? What is an infinitive? What is a participle? These are concepts that are very much Indo-European. Speakers of languages outside that family (which is checks notes most people) have no idea what one or more of these are. So that's three alien grammatical concepts right off the top of my head in Esperanto's grammar, and while sure it's more regular (FSVO "regular") than in natural languages, it's the conceptual barrier that is hard to breach, not the rote memory work to learn them once you've grokked the idea. So again, slightly more difficult to learn a natural language, but even a natural language with as low a speaker count as Basque will give you about as many people to talk to as does Esperanto while the Big Name™ languages will give you multiple of orders of magnitude more. Each.
6. Esperanto assumes that notions of "subject", "object", and "argument" are linguistic universals. They aren't. This makes Esperanto's twee case structure with its cute little suffixes actually fiendishly difficult to learn for speakers of languages that mix agents, experiencers, and patients in ways different from the Indo-European majority. (Don't know what agents, experiencers, and patients are? Maybe you should crack open an inventory of linguistics before talking about how "easy" a language is to learn...)
7. Why are there plurals in Esperanto? Why decline for number at all? Plenty of languages don't and it works just fine. OK, so for whatever reason you think plurals are necessary: WHY THE HELL DOES ESPERANTO ALSO HAVE COUNT/VERB AGREEMENT!? That's just bizarre even in many languages that have retained the unnecessary concept of a plural!
8. Personal pronouns. Ugh. There's first person singular and plural (but no way to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive in the latter case). There's second person with no ability to distinguish singular and plural (because consistency is for whiners!). There's gendered (🙄) singular third-person, but non-gendered (let's be honest: default-masculine) third-person. And then there's a weird one (oni) that means one. Or people. Because screw making sense! Why are there gendered pronouns at all!? They serve no useful purpose; many languages (including Farsi, the language of Iran(!)) eschew them completely, and others (e.g. Mandarin) only distinguish them in writing (and that itself is a very recent cultural import!).
9. Articles. WHY IS THERE AN ARTICLE IN ESPERANTO!? And why only one!? You've eliminated all the other articles, take that final step dammit! Join the majority of world languages which don't bother with these vestigial adverbs!

And I'm out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They're "natural" or even "logical". But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you're going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it's best to expend your efforts:

1. On a fantasy football league language that has maybe a million speakers world-wide (and that's being generous!); or,
2. On a natural language that's a little bit more difficult but gives you access to ~1 billion native speakers and ~200 million secondary speakers (Mandarin), ~475/75 million (Spanish), ~400 million/~1 billion (English), 350/250 million (Hindi), or even 50/26 million (Hausa)?

If you're sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)

Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It's a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.

If you're going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn't filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by ... Or you're going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.

No. Just bluntly no.

I did try using Dvorak. I got pretty good at it. After about four months I could finally type as quickly and effectively on Dvorak as I could on QWERTY.

On. One. Computer.

I sit down at a friend's computer or a family member's? Newp. I use a phone or a tablet? Newp. I use a work computer (where I'm not permitted to install my own software)? Newp.

So that's four months of reduced capacity to type, plus having to keep QWERTY in my muscle memory anyway (with the attendant confusion and error rate that causes!) all for ... not really getting much more speed than I was able to do with QWERTY in the first place.

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Phase 3:

And that's where it sticks forever. Longest test run was over an hour.

Indeed whenever I try to upload anything (including the images used in this report that I eventually had to host at imgur) I get this popping up briefly:

That might be a useful data point.

I've been unable to make any posts of any kind today. Was there a server update that turned that off?

Another new edition of Runequest? What is this, version 7? Or is it 8 now? What is it that makes Runequest so cursed in its publication history? 😲

Show me now a picture of people walking around public spaces reading papers.

"Banned from Twitter" is usually code for "right-wing extremist" IME. I mean look at Gab or Parler and see what's mostly in there.

… the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 …

Ooh! I missed that one!

There was no Tiananmen Square Massacre. At all. This is hinted at in the very title of the piece you quoted: 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. There's a few "facts" you're going to find out, to your likely intense shock, surrounding that.

1. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Citing the same source you quoted:

Several people who were situated around the square that night, including former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post Jay Mathews and CBS correspondent Richard Roth reported that while they had heard sporadic gunfire, they could not find enough evidence to suggest that a massacre took place on the Square itself.

Taiwan-born Hou Dejian was present in the square to show solidarity with the students and claimed that he didn't see any massacre occurring in the square. He was quoted by Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident to have stated, "Some people said 200 died in the square, and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say I did not see any of that. I was in the square until 6:30 in the morning."

Want non-Chinese sources? How about The Columbia Journalism Review? Read that and a few more similar sources (the finding of which is left as a learning exercise) and upon completion ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?

2. No matter what you think you remember, Tank Man did not get run over.

I have met people utterly SHOCKED (indeed shaken to their core) when faced with the evidence that what they "clearly remember"—Tank Man being squished into pulp under the treads of merciless Chinese tanks—never happened, but … it didn't. If you remember seeing Tank Man killed, you are the victim of very skilled propaganda using carefully timed editing, skillfully worded suggestion, and flat-out lies.

The full video exists showing the aftermath of the famous, iconic shots that shocked the world. It's a good exercise to seek it out. When you do, ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?

3. The real story of what went on is far darker.

Not only because of what it implies for the Chinese people but also because of what it implies for western people. The truth is that there was protests aplenty in Beijing in 1989. And there was a massacre. It's just that the protests the Chinese government was nervous of were worker protests, not student protests. The thing is that the western press didn't want to do the actual work (and dangerous work!) of covering these. The children cosplaying revolutionary were far more photogenic and could be covered within a brief walk from the popular journalist hang-out hotel.

Further, the corporate masters of most western media really did not want to be broadcasting stories of workers rising in rebellion against cruel masters. It would have struck far too close to home, that would have. Much better to focus on the cute kiddies playing revolutionary! D'aw! They even have a mock Statue of Liberty they call the Goddess of Democracy! Aren't they cute!?

The real massacre was near Muxidi. It was a massacre of workers who'd finally had enough and snapped. Who'd rioted and attacked police and PLA. Who were subsequently mercilessly gunned down by machine gun, run over by tanks and APCs and generally slaughtered. It was the low point of governance in the modern era of China and it sparked quiet reforms that continue to this day: some good for the people, some ... not so good.

In retrospect the press story never really made any sense. The students at the protests came from all the top universities in Beijing and environs. They were the scions of the most powerful and wealthy people in China. They were the sons and daughters of Chinese leaders! I know that people have been trained for their entire lives into thinking that the Chinese are unthinking, unfeeling robots, but do you seriously believe it extends to the point that Chinese leaders are going to order the massacre of their very own children!?

Ponder that for a while, and ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?

4. The protests (and suppressions) didn't just happen in Beijing.

One of the huge problems I have with the ZOMG THEY KILLED ALL THE STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE!!!!!!1111oneoneoneeleventyone!!! narrative is that not only does it suppress the worker uprising and subsequent bloody suppression in Beijing, it also hides the same uprisings and suppressions that happened all over the place! There were protests in Shanghai. In Fujian province. In Hubei province. In all kinds of places. Workers protested. Low-level Communist Party officials protested. PLA SOLDIERS PROTESTED! This was a nationwide political disaster brewing and all of that is erased in the official western record of cute kids cosplaying counter-revolutionary.

What possible motive could the press have for not reporting this? (It was known to them. You'll find sources detailing that quite easily once you drop down that particular rabbit hole.) Ponder that and ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?

5. Things have actually improved since then.

You don't last as long as absolute dictators as the Chinese government has, over a population as unruly as the Chinese have historically always been, if you're stupid. While the Chinese government did clamp down and clamp down hard (the better term is "brutally") on the uprisings (note the plural) they also recognized what led to them and started to, get this, fix the problems.

Jackasses from the west bemoan that the locals don't want to talk about 1989 with them. There's three major reasons for this, however.

1. Nobody trusts the west. There's a long, ignoble tradition of the western press putting sources at risk and then topping it all off by lying. Of fucking course they're not going to want to talk about politically-sensitive issues, knowing that western reporters are sociopaths who'll put them and their families at risk all for the fucking clicks.
2. Most of the time people use the wrong language. They assume everybody calls it the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre for instance. Which is not the term used here. Quite often, I suspect, the people being asked have no idea what they're being asked. It would be like me going up to an American and asking them their opinion on Santa Anna's Grand Victory or whatever.
3. 1989 is over 30 years ago. Most of the people being addressed weren't even born for it. Many of the rest were in middle school. They don't know, and don't care, what you're talking about. Kind of like how most Americans alive today don't know or care about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Correction: all those labels I quoted had meaning. Meaning in language is determined by usage, not by fiat. (If you don't agree, I'd ask you to point me to the authority you recognize for language meaning…) In usage outside of very specific technical contexts they have all lost meaning because grandstanders and ignoramuses love to reach for the worst word they used when dismissively labelling someone with whom they disagree.

Why reach for "authoritarian right-winger", after all, when "YOU'RE A LITERAL NAZI!" packs a more solid punch (in their minds)? Why reach for "authoritarian left-winger" when you could screech "TANKIE!" at the top of your lungs?

Terms which become epithets follow this inevitable downhill path: term of the art → symbolic term → epithet → "person with whom I mildly or greatly disagree, along with an annotation of my tribal involvement".

You seriously can't fathom the notion of disagreeing respectfully? Of respectful criticism? Really?

As with most political slurs, while originally having some (albeit often overstated) meaning, "tankie" boils down today to "you person with whom I disagree". C.f. "Nazi" or "SJW" or "MAGAt" or any number of other tribal signalling mechanisms.

Generally I find people who resort to such political slurs prone to using them in place of thoughtful discourse, so upon hearing them used—no matter which political ideology is being slurred thusly—I assume the person using them has nothing valid to say and skip to the next post. As such I advocate strongly for people using them as often as they like. It helps me bypass the chaff that much more quickly.