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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead! I don’t recommend it on mobile unless you have no other choice (I’m largely not a fan of mobile games anyway though) but it’s amazing on desktop. If you can get past the simple graphics (like dwarf fortress it hss ASCII graphics, but you can easily get different tile sets to add graphics for everything), it’s an amazing game with a ton of content.

    It’s a zombie survival rogue-like game, you don’t gain skills or anything between runs (you can unlock different scenarios and professions though, or just unlock them all from the settings), but you do gain your own experience. You can have a character for hours, then die and make a new one that dies in 5 minutes, etc. Save scum if you want, but the whole point is to let your characters die and try something new (I save scum on longer-running characters when I run into new mechanics or monsters but that’s it). When I say there is a ton to do, I mean it. People have added (and continue to add) a ton of content, and mostly with a focus on making interaction as realistic as possible.

    Want to kill zombies with traps? They can start with a basic tripwire to trip zombies to slow them down and alert you, and go up to mechanized blade traps that cut them in half quickly.

    Want to do a stealthy run? For melee, the Ninjutsu martial art has silent attacks and makes you walk quieter. For ranged, bows and crossbows are quiet (and can be made quieter with mods that reduce bow-string noise), but you’ll want to make your own arrows eventually - and you can!

    Want some transportation? Cars! Plenty of broken ones scattered in cities and towns - decent amount that still work too. There’s gas, diesel, electric, hybrid, and several other kinds of vehicles. You can train up your mechanics skill (or start with a high mech skill, if you want) for replacing/repairing parts, adding onto to existing cars, or even assembling them from scratch. Got something you don’t know how to kill? A random car you find driving 40+ mph works wonders for turning problems into smears.

    Want to eat just candy and junk food? Your character will eventually get to varying levels of overweight which reduces your stamina and speed. Don’t eat enough calories? Become skinny, decreasing your strength and health. It’s not hard to eat balanced, but it is something to keep in mind.

    Find too many things you’re trying to bring back to your car or base? Find a shopping cart (or my preferred item mover - industrial trash cans) and load items up, much easier to move more and heavier things in a single trip can even mount your shopping carts and trash cans to a car with bike racks so you can bring them with. Can also weld baskets or install trash cans in/on cars to increase your storage area.

    Want to do colony survival? You can recruit NPCs you find in the world and make a compound.

    Farming? Yep. Brewing/distilling? Yep. Magic? There’s a mod for that. Loony-toons esque killing a big scary zombie with an anvil (or other heavy object)? Just put one on the roof and push it over the edge. Guns? Whole stores of them. Fire? I like lighting 2 story houses on fire, they make a ton of noise and draw in all the nearby zombies, then the falling debris and fire kill them.










  • Because there was no /s - no they didn’t, it’s been around for a little while now. It basically means products or services slowly getting worse rather than better - such as adding ads, adding useless or broken ai to everything, switching to a subscription without adding any actual value. This is almost always done in the interest of maximizing profit as much as possible, at the expense of the users (monetarily and experience wise). Basically, see any major company decisions in the last several years, especially at companies with very large audiences (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, Facebook, etc)




  • Biggest piece of advice, you don’t need to document everything you do in your life. If it’s info you might use in the future, a significant interaction or event, fun tidbit etc, add it in. If it’s just a casual conversation with someone that you don’t learn anything significant or it’s something that you’ll never link to or use again, just keep it as a memory.

    I did a lot of over-capturing early on and got a lot of fatigue from it. Now my note making is as I run across things I’ll want to reference in the future (plans that were made, ideas to learn more about later, important phone calls/interactions, notes on articles, updates on projects, etc), with refinement to those ideas coming when I access them again later (or if I’m bored and have time). It’s no longer a drain to grow my PKM, it’s slower but much more meaningful info


  • Honestly, whatever works for you.

    My preferred system is two big directories, one for your daily notes (dailies, journal, etc), and another for literally everything else.

    This is how logseq is implemented, and can easily setup emacs org-roam to do it too. It’s very nice because you don’t need to worry about where to put something, throw it in your daily journals and get all the info down there, and link densely. If it’s about a specific topic, link to it and when you go to that topic you’ll see the info in the back links below (logseq does it automatically, emacs take a bit of config). You can then transcribe the important/summary/etc info from all of your aggregated back links into a single well thought out and planned document, or at least a single trimmed down one. Or, just leave all the info in the back links, whatever works best for you



  • In my CS degree I would have only learned and used java if not for my optional data science courses, a single class on machine language, a single SQL course, and a c++ course at community college before going to uni.

    My data science courses introduced me to matlab, bash, r, Julia, python, machine learning, docker, Linux, and aws. My uni didn’t even have a data science degree, those courses primarily counted towards my math minor since they were under statistics.

    The one piece of advice I still give to every CS student I meet is to diversify your classes whenever possible, don’t just stick to the core comp sci classes and take throwaway electives


  • I use bspwm and I really like the unicorne philosophy of the config files (bspwm controls your windows and such, sxhkd controls keybinds, two separate programs and config files. The bspwm config file is also just a bash file so you can add anything bash related to it easily.

    This said, I love the dynamic workspaces on i3 and wish bspwm could replicate them. I don’t like i3 enough to switch to it purely because it’s also on x, but when Nvidia gets better Wayland support I’m definitely hopping ship to sway (i3 on sway basically)… Or when I’m able to swap my 3080 ti for an and gpu at a reasonable price



  • My maternal grandmother - extremely nice and sweet, died of breast cancer when I was a kid so I don’t remember much else about her.

    My maternal grandfather - convicted for soliciting an underage prostitute (undercover cop), that’s all I know about him and it’s enough. Not sure if he’s even alive.

    Paternal grandparents - psychotic religious fanatics (burned our Harry Potter and Mickey the sorcerer books while babysitting when I was a baby, killed multiple of my dad’s pets growing up, etc). Have only seen that grandmother when the grandfather died and at a Christmas party a month later - still psychotic and super rude.

    My parents - nicest people you’ll ever meet, I have basically no bad memories from being raised (except my dad only makes broccoli and cauliflower by microwaving it)