• 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • If you haven’t played Inscryption, just ignore everything else and do that first. It’s the most innovative deckbuilding game I’ve played, but saying more would spoil it.

    Ascension is a short-ish one I’ve sunk a lot of hours into. It’s sort of like dominion meets Magic. The expansions make it a lot more interesting, but the full package is pretty cheap. It was designed by an MTG pro player who was sick of exactly that.

    Black book is excellent, and managers to put a compelling narrative spin on a TCG.

    Monster train is a good “it’s like slay the spire, but not slay the spire” option for when you just can’t look at another shiv.



  • I’m for defederation at least until instance blocking is available. I’ve already blocked most of their communities from my feed, but comments have been really unpleasant since they federated.

    It’s not really about the ideology as much as not wanting to have to scroll past endless political bickering. Rage addiction is real and contagious.



  • I’m having a great time, but I also love FO4 and No Man’s Sky. The toe-dip I’ve done into colony building shows that they put real thought into Astroneer-like automated manufacturing stuff, which is my crack, and something I missed in NMS and FO4. It’s also clear from the first city that they know how depressing FO4 is, and wanted to add more variety.

    Story and characters are a cut above any other Bethesda game so far, but that’s not saying much. My wife is replaying BG3 next to me, and it makes Starfield’s writing look amateurish by comparison. It’s not the core of the game though, so eh.

    Downsides so far have been that the minor planets/moons don’t have much to do, and that inventory management is annoying with how much crafting components weigh.

    Ship combat is… Fine. It’s not as intricate as Elite: Dangerous or SW:Squadrons (for sim gamers, weapons are all on REALLY forgiving gimbals, which makes precision unnecessary), but not actively bad like NMS VR. I think it’s a good compromise, because not everyone wants to deal with a realistic sim in what is essentially a minigame.

    It’s also complex, which is good, but adds some awkwardness to the beginning.




  • There’s a difference between allowing speech about a thing and embracing the thing. This is a classic case of embrace, extend, extinguish.

    If you’re interested, I’d look into what happened with XMPP and Google talk. XMPP was a federated chat service. Google Talk became compatible with it, and instantly became the most popular client for it.

    It then broke compatibility slowly, pushing more people from other XMPP clients onto Google talk.

    They finally removed it completely, and because they were the most popular client, XMPP users moved to Google talk to maintain their connections to other users. The protocol basically ceased to exist.

    People are broadly assuming that’s Meta’s plan with threads and Mastodon, because it’s an extremely common way for corporations to get rid of open systems.



  • The problem is that the articles from exploring heads take an average of two sentences to reach an obvious and malicious lie. There is no room for discussion under those circumstances.

    For those who don’t respect the authority of conservatives as the arbiters of reality, they have no purpose except as a glimpse into the abyss. It’s like having your stream of memes interrupted every few pages by a graphic crime scene photo, only with the dread that comes with knowing that the criminal has a wide support base.






  • I’ve got a few fun ones:

    At night, my cat sometimes gets the zoomies, so I have a projector pointed at a wall with a motion sensor. When he goes on his tear through the house while we’re sleeping, the projector turns on and plays a video of strings moving on the wall. This tires him out without him screaming at us to play with him. It turns off again after a few minutes with no motion.

    The lights and Roku screens in my office are on a motion sensor, but are also linked with a seat sensor so they don’t turn off when I’m at my desk. Sitting at the desk also sends a Wake on LAN packet to my computer. Sitting at my electronics workbench changes the lights to bright white with another seat sensor.

    Lights (HA), desktop wallpaper (with Wallpaper Engine), and in-computer RGB (using OpenRGB) change from blue/pink during the day to dark red/orange at sunset so being in my office late doesn’t mess with my sleep.

    A macro button next to my keyboard disables my screens and turns on a fan pointed at my VR area for workouts.