swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

Posts

2

Comments

310

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yes, but nobody plays Tarmac and Turnstiles, the game of Uneventful Travel.

...yes, but that also has the trade-off of moving your rolls from a flat distribution where every value between 1-20 have equal weight, to a bell curve that peaks at 10.5.

Many of your rolls are gonna end up right around that 10-11 mark as a result. Which can be fine! #alldicearebeautiful

But it's not gonna be a great drop in replacement for D&D. D&D's skill checks are built around beating numbers that you're not going to reach as easily with 3d6 vs a flat d20.

Basically, more dice = more predictability and fewer wild swings of fortune. That is a more accurate model of reality.... But arguably less fun in a game.

Imagine the difference in dramatic tension in a game where the boss has 50 HP. In one scenario, you deal a consistent 5.5 HP each round. In the other, you deal 1d10 damage each round.

In the long run, you'll deal the same amount of damage in either system. But the randomness of a 1d10 creates more dramatic tension and excitement! When you roll a 1, it's a crushing setback. A 10? Instant jubilation.

Because not all currencies and economies are created equal.

Someone in Thailand can live pretty dang well on an income of USD$10,000/year. The median income is about 5K/year (but with much of the nation as subsistence farmers.) Anyway. If you make 5-10Kbucks a year, a $20 DVD is a lot more expensive, relatively speaking.

So companies sold DVDs for much lower prices (at least, in USD) in markets like that. This way, the people in "poorer" nations can still afford to buy the latest Hollywood bullshot and our cultural hegemony is maintained.

But when you have region-specific pricing, that creates opportunities for arbitrage, that is, some US dude could fly to Thailand, fill his suitcases with DVDs and then resell them in the US at a profit.

And that was a Problem. Not because of individual profiteers, per se, but because if the opportunity is big enough, someone will make a business out of it. Instead of Blockbusters on every street corner, you'd have the local Thai import store selling the latest Marvel flicks for half the cost of a US print.

So - region-locked discs. Which were immediately cracked and sued over. And since the internet had really arrived by then, we all took advantage of these amazing new DVD-copying skillz to share movie files for FREEEE. And thus, piracy turned out to be a much bigger issue than region-specific pricing.

There are still regional pricing issues. Valve just axed region-specific pricing in Argentina, for instance, which immediately locks most of the country out of affording games.

I don't have a tidy ending to this. It's complicated and unclear (at least, to me) whether the public interest is better served by regional pricing or not.

But that's the long and stupid story of why OP can't play their legally acquired DVDs tonight.

I like Generations way more than say, First Contact.

Generations, for all its flaws, was a science fiction story passing the torch from TOS to TNG, and saying something about the characters and world of Star Trek.

First Contact was a generic action-adventure movie wearing a Star Trek uniform.

Honestly, I consider Generations to be the only interesting TNG movie.

I like both movies, but I think The Matrix has a billion times more spectacle going for it. I still think about The Thirteenth Floor regularly, but I'd rather sit down and watch The Matrix again for entertainment's sake.

Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline... Bah.

...So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you'd like it!

Back in the day, if you joined an adhoc mesh network - ever - then Win XP would broadcast that network SSID anytime you weren't connected to anything else.

So once, someone somewhere created an ad hoc network named "Free Public Wi-Fi" and people being people, someone else connected to it. After that, every time their laptop had no other viable connection, their machine would offer "Free Public Wi-Fi"... and the machine of anyone else who connected would behave the same way.

Sorry, that's more than fifty words.

Tl;Dr: it was an accidental virus that took advantage of a bug in human psychology. And Windows XP. Eventually, XP was patched.

Check out Golvellius: Valley of Doom. It was a Zelda clone, but I think it's more fun than the original.

I mean, yeah, sure. ...but I'm still conflicted about the local heroin addicts standing in the frozen aisle scarfing a bucket of ice cream.

I mean, I don't really give a shit about the theft, but they tend to stand there with the door open and thaw the rest of the ice cream while they're at it. It's enough of an issue locally that a couple of local chains have literally started chaining up their ice cream like it's the goddamn crown jewels. I just want non-crystallized ice cream!

Also... In my experience, people mostly don't steal food outside of cases like having the heroin hungries. Food banks do an okay job at keeping people fed at least. (Aside: When you donate to your local food bank, donate money, not food! They can buy much more food in bulk - your dollars will go farther that way!) Mostly, I see people stealing things like resaleable electronics or OTC drugs that have useful precursor chems.

Don't get me wrong - I know fuckin' Krogers can take it. I just see this meme about seeing people stealing food and like... That's mostly not a thing. Food banks and food stamps work okay. They aren't great, the food often sucks - but generally speaking, you don't have to steal food to survive when you're poor in America. You might need to steal drugs and airpods though.

There can be, but this one has a busted face and some other cosmetic damage. The mechanism still works fine, but this particular watch isn't really gonna be worth anything to anyone but us.

Other watches she's repaired have been worth up to a few hundred dollars. ...Which actually isn't that much for watches. At the high end, the really bonkers shit can cost over 100K. These sorts of watches are hand built by master craftsmen and take a really long goddamn time to make (hence the price). But they tend to be absolutely gorgeous and marvels of mechanical engineering.

So, as watches go, she's paddling about in the shallows, repairing things like the odd Tissot or Omega, which can be valuable-ish. But usually sub-200, occasionally up to $600-700.

I mean... Gary Bowser got three years and millions of dollars in fines for running the website of a modchip company.

If it's like a pleasant tingling through your head, it might be ASMR. It can be triggered by sounds (hence the bajillion YouTube channels), but for me it's more often when I'm really enjoying thinking about something. It's a weird sensation for sure.

I got the earwax but good. I usually abuse qtips too.

But.

If you want to really know what a clean ear canal is like, get a squeeze bulb. You fill it with hot water (hot like tap, not like boiled) and then hydroblast your ear holes until all the wax melts and runs out.

When you get rid of a real bad wax ball... Aww man, it's amazing. It's like you just removed earplugs. The world is suddenly so much louder.

Fuckin' amazing.

...scuse me, I think Imma go find my squeeze bulb.

My wife collects mechanical wristwatches. But since we aren't millionaires, she buys them in bulk lots online. Most times she'll get an interesting or semi-valuable watch or two. Usually broken or damaged in some way, but often within her ability to repair.

So. One day her watch haul included a double hunter pocketwatch whose maker's mark we weren't familiar with - "JW Benson". And inside the case was the text "Watchmaker by warrants to the Queen and the Prince of Wales."

Between those two, we managed to deduce that it had been manufactured sometime around 1880 (+/- a couple years. The company was bombed in WWII and a lot of records burned. IIRC, we had narrowed it to like a five year span, but the exact dates couldn't be determined beyond that)

Anyway. That watch - which still runs - is probably the oldest thing.

There are a bajillion distros out there and you already have a lot of suggestions here, so instead, allow me to note a few things I think are handy while learning Linux.

1. Most Linux distros are customized versions of a few base distros. Once you learn how the base distro lays things out, that knowledge is transferable (more or less) to other distros in the same family. But solutions that work in one family of distros may not work on another!

Some common base distros:

• Debian: Stability-above-all; all-rounder distro. Updates slowly, but provides a very-well-tested base that many other distros build on. Ubuntu and its derivatives are built on Debian.
• Red Hat: A commercially-focused distro that I haven't used in a looong time, so I won't say too much about it. Slightly less popular as a desktop basis than Debian, perhaps, but also a solid all-rounder.
• Arch: If computers were cars... Arch is for the Hot-Rodders. You have a ton of control to optimize and tweak Arch to precisely meet your needs. When you want to really dig into the machine and tune it to peak performance, this is where you begin. Fortunately, Arch-based distros often forego the detailed install of their parent and just provide a fast-updating, highly-tuned Linux experience. SteamOS is said to be a customized Arch.

2. Software installation / updating is simpler and more confusing than either the Windows or Mac worlds.

It's very rare to have a Linux program require an installer like Windows, and it's not as simple as drag-and-drop install like Mac. Linux has had the equivalent of "app stores" for a looong time, just minus the tracking and selling parts.

Most programs in Linux get installed via a package manager tool. There are various front ends, but under the hood, there's usually a command line program handling installation and updates.

Generally speaking, Debians use "apt", RedHats use "yum" and Arches use "pacman". There are also "flatpak" and "snap" both of which are more recent managers that attempt to solve dependency hell.

3. The terminal is gonna come up. Love it or hate it, the terminal is still at the heart of the Linux experience. There are guis for pretty much anything you want to do, but because Linux is so highly customizable, help forums and such tend to give solutions in the one constant: bash scripts.

That said, you can get around just fine without it if you really want to. Just recognize that you might be swimming upstream at times.

4. You can customize anything! Your desktop environment is pretty much a given on Windows and Mac. On Linux you can install something comfy, like Gnome (customizable, lightweight, akin to Mac UI) or KDE (less customizable, very pretty Windows-style UI).

Or try something experimental like Ratpoison - a window manager that requires no mouse inputs!

Part of the fun of Linux is trying out alternatives and truly customizing your personal computer.

...That's it, I think!

Good luck! Have fun!

Mathollomew

Aww man, I wish I had time to type it out. One of my favorite jokes to tell is a really long garden path story about a man and a one-eyed halibut. It's multiple minutes of setup and the punchline is just bad. It's not even a pun. It's the worst joke I know.

But I love telling it to people because it's almost a practical joke by the time I reach the end.

Nobody laughs the first time. But everyone who's heard it once, laughs when they see me inflict it on a new victim.

It's hard to compare apples and mangos, but if we're gonna consider favorite tropical fruits, I friggin love fresh mangosteen. It's like a little fruity Bob-bom. Smooth and silky texture, creamy sweet flesh and just fantastic. They don't seem to travel well, unfortunately.

Or fresh pineapple.

I had fresh pineapple off a farmer's cart in the tropics two decades back. Afterward, I couldn't eat pineapple in the US for almost three years. It was so much better than the canned or grocery-store stuff there was just no comparison.

Durian: tastes like Heaven; smells like Hell.

One time, I had a box of durian-flavored cookies. (Think Oreos, but with durian filling). I brought them to work to share with my coworkers (because I can't eat a whole box by myself and I didn't plan to leave a partially-eaten and open box to linger in my house).

I knew I was in trouble when I opened the box and realized that each cookie was individually sealed. As soon as I broke the seal on the first cookie the, err, unmistakeable durian scent began to waft through the office.

I'd only managed to convince a single coworker to join my cookie break, but even having opened only two cookies, it wasn't long before someone walking twenty feet distant sniffed the air and asked in a worried tone, "Does anyone smell gas?"

"It's these cookies!"

"Cookies?! No - I smell natural gas, man! Like sulphur!"

"Yeah. It's these cookies. Want one? They're durian flavored!"

"Uh, no."

"They taste better than they smell!"

"...low bar. Still gonna pass on that."

...after the third person worrying about gas leaks, I had to throw away the rest of the cookies. Outside.

The moment I realized that no one. Anywhere. Has any idea what they are doing.