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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Dungeons and dragons, both the paper version and the digital stuff. I remember as a kid playing some random DnD games with no context and being upset that they were weird rpgs that only went up to level 8 or whatever. Without context, that is not common in videoganes. And not knowing how much more open the games could have been than just playing them “murder hobo” style…

    I only ended up playing paper DnD at around the start of 5e, while I was tangentially aware of it since I think before third edition, I didn’t know I would actually like it back then. And it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have. I have a processing delay, so whether or not I end up enjoying board games, or anything else involving players taking turns doing complicated thinking… largely depends on how patient the other players are.

    I also wasn’t super creative back then… although maybe playing DnD would have helped. But at the very least, I wish I would have tried learning paper DnD back then even if I didn’t like it, so I had the context when I played the digital games. I would have very much appreciated those if I understood why certain limitations were in place.

    I mean, could you imagine a DnD digital game trying to accurately represent the capabilities of level 20 characters… hitting level 20 in DnD basically forces your campaign into “jumping the shark”. Which omnipotent god are we one-shotting this week?



  • There is a bunch of different modern versions of Myst. It’s also got a VR version that is very good. Riven and Obduction are also available in VR. Not sure about some of the lesser known Myst games like exile, uru, or revelation.

    In my experience, playing them when I was younger didn’t work out great, some of the puzzles were just way too hard for pre-teen me. But they were great to play now.



  • Ah ok, they already have a built-in hand-wavey mechanic to explain it. That’s handy. Extrapolation from their inability to think creatively and only mimic, it seems like that would indeed set up for physical mimicry too. But that would probably get old fast, since it would have to be at the expense of gaining stuff naturally with levels. You’d either have to be trained everything you want to know, or have the DM set up encouters that makes sense for picking it up eventually. Maybe fun for the first couple levels, but just unnecessary tedium as it goes on.

    Certainly makes more sense fun-wise to retcon the scope of the curse to a more limited handicap. Something that fits the scope of a single hardship slot.


  • Awesome, I love the idea of building a working library of dialogue to make use of. Technically mimicry would mean having no actual understanding of the phrases actual meaning so it would have to be coincidental to say something useful in context… but it would be such a fun mechanic I would find some way to hand-wave it into making sense.

    Might also be fun to extend the mimicry to physical mimicry too. Maybe picking up something that you have seen X number of times. Though that would add even more data tracking, hehe.


  • The process of making a game on your own involves failing to make the first 10 games you try to make on your own.

    Ultimately, it sounds like you already have a good handle on everything that goes into it, and are just hoping to hear it’s not actually as hard as you think it is… it is hard. Know that going in, and assess if you will be able to do it. But give yourself a bit of benefit, getting most of the way tends to increase your resiliance to the final hurdles.




  • While I agree that’s it’s nice to have the option of a physical copy, I own too many games to want a physical copy of all of them. And if they are ever “taken away” I will not hesitate to get them back. I don’t want to own physical copies of my games, but I do feel entitled to continue owning them even after the store I bought them from no longer exists. I will just download any game I have owned that I want to play again but no longer have access to the paid version. Kind of like how emulation works. I only use it to play games I own that I don’t want to play the physical copy of.



  • I use my hands to kind of do the same thing. It’s probably the behaviour they modeled Monk’s “hand thing” after. It still helps even if I’m searching using my memory and spatial awareness to recall and search through something I am not currently looking at. Somehow, narrowing the scope physically with my hands helps. It’s probably a muscle memory or proprioception thing.

    For example, if I want to find something to eat in the fridge. I generally won’t be able to think of anything by just opening the fridge and looking through it. Unless there is something super obvious like a leftover pizza box or something else impossible to miss like that. Just trying to search by looking at each shelf only increases the odds of finding something by like 5%. But when I use my hand and slowly move it down the shelves, I can somehow think more clearly about what is on each shelf than I could without using my hand. And, as I mentioned, it also works even if I am no longer looking in the fridge. I can do it with the door closed and still more clearly recall what was on each shelf.

    It also helps when scanning through my whole house looking for something, with and without currently having eyes on it. Like scanning through the whole house room by room while still sitting at my computer, I do a much better job if I am pointing my hand at the place I am thinking about as I scan.

    I should probably mention I am Autistic, my spatial awareness and proprioception are two areas I have seemed to benefit. But it’s very easy to get confused or distracted if I have too much information at once. So that is mostly what is going on. I can’t just imagine that I am pointing at something in my imagination to gain the benefit, I have to be literally, physically pointing. Although I can translocate, like not be at my house or fridge and still scan my house or fridge by pointing relatively where each thing would be if they were there.

    It’s not limited in scope as far as I can tell. Though it is kind of limited in resolution. The bigger the area I am scanning, the less detail I can recall about it when I am not there, or “looking through walls”. But when I am there, I can go as fine grained as the search demands, just takes longer.


  • One thing to keep in mind, just to get your expectations right. Kids are more neuroplastic than us, and it takes kids about 5 years of practicing every day to get fluent at their first language. They are learning a few more things for the first time during that too. But you can expect it to take about as many practice hours. So if you only practice 1 hour a week, it’s gonna be a long time. But also, you don’t need to hit the bar of “fluent” to solve your problem. Where kids are at after 1 year is very serviceable for it instead being a second language. If you plan to move to an english speaking country, that would be plenty to get by in your day to day life while you all of a sudden start also spending every day practicing.

    Learning to read and interpret a new language is more than 10 times easier than learning to speak it. Even just writing in it, where you have all the time in the world to compose each sentence is going to take alot of practice to get good at. For speaking, you have to be quick enough to form full sentences in seconds, at a time where it’s not the main thought process going on in your head.


  • When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

    The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.


  • Well, you got the answers you were looking for, here is a different answer. To your other implied question, how to not worry about dust getting in other holes.

    Main thing is to develop positive air pressure. You want more powered intake than powered exhaust.

    Use fans for all your filtered air intakes, ignore powered air exhaust, run it at lower fan speeds if you can. Air will get out fine. If you force the air in where you want it to go in, dust will only go into the easily removable filters, it won’t be on your components. Any extra hole in the case will just be exhausting the already filtered air. Then just remember to actually check and clean your filters. That’s the hard part. But if you clean them when they need to be cleaned, you will never have to actually clean the inside or the fans or components or anything else, just the filters.





  • And, you’d want/need redundancy. One on-site back up for quick restoration and one off-site for surviving physical disaster. So, you’d need at least 3 times that. In HDD prices, that is roughly 2.5 million per set-up, or 7.5 million total for all three. And in SSD prices, well it’s about 3x that. 7.5 million per set up and 22.5million for all three.

    An alternate option is a distributed back-up. They could have people volunteer to store and host like 10 gigs each, and just hand out each 10 gig chunk to 10 different people. That would take alot of work to set up, but it would be alot safer. And there are already programs/systems like that to model after. 10 gigs is just an example, might be more successful or even more possible in chunks of 1-2 terabytes. Basically one full hard drive per volunteer.

    Lol, had to add that after doing the math for 10 gigs to ten people and realising that was 1000 people per terabyte, so would take 150 million volunteers. Even at 2 petabytes each, assuming we still wanted 10x redundancy in that model, it would be like 750 thousand volunteers or something like that. Maybe there is no sustainable volunteer driven model, lol.