u/AwkwardTurtle

Penric & Desdemona

I don't think anyone was suggesting some sort of government enforcement action here. Just expressing disappointment at a lack of consequence over immoral actions.

The car dealer metaphor was clearly just a metaphor.

Ha, I recognize this one. I did an analysis/writeup of the word count of SCP articles over time (at best tangential to drama, not about the drama so not really suitable to be posted to this sub as a full writeup, I mentioned it in the scuffles thread at the time) and ran a manual count/check of a lot of articles that my automated script couldn't handle.

2521 appeared like the script had failed on it, but it didn't! Actually no words!

As the opposite end of this story, I discovered Bôa via Lain but continued to listen to them long past me watching anime with any regularity.

Fast-forward to 2025 and I'm shocked to see that the band had apparently gotten back together to release a new album, and listening to it felt like they hadn't missed a beat at all. Then I saw they would be playing a show in my city and I had to go, it had never occurred to me I might get the chance to see them live since they'd been inactive for near two decades.

Imagine my surprise when I show up and the venue is filled with children who I am confident hadn't been born yet when I first got into the band. So I'm standing in the merch line searching the Internet to figure out why, and saw they'd gone viral on tiktok

Show was great, the 21+ area was extremely chill due to the lack of people in it, and all the kids were singing along with every song. Genuinely a fantastic time.

Very thankful for whatever vagaries of fate and tastes of the younger generation that lined up to bring Bôa back from the dead.

Yeah, I'm also of the opinion that I just don't really buy that people can articulate their opinions with that degree of granularity. Maybe I'm just projecting from my own experience, but you're telling me there's a meaningful difference in how much you liked a book you rated 2.5 and one you rated 2.75 stars?

5 stars lets me rate things based on what I thought goodreads had at one point described their system as:

1. Didn't like it
2. It was okay
3. Liked it
4. Really liked it
5. Loved it

But I suspect some of this is down to modern rating systems making it seem that if you rate something lower than 4 stars you must have hated it. So once you start cramming your entire functional rating range into 4-5 stars maybe wanting to subdivide those stars starts to look necessary.

I recently got back into a site that lets you rate things on a percentile scale, and I just can't imagine that level of precision being meaningful unless you're working off of a rubric or something.

Just Background Noise does (mostly) Morrowind challenge runs, with the additional layer that they're framed as having some in universe narrative justification.

Beating Morrowind without magic isn't just for the challenge, it's because Giles the Orc hates magic. The RP isn't all consuming or too intense, but it is quite funny and makes the videos a lot more entertaining than they would be if it were just purely a challenge run. Partly because almost any challenge you can think of in Morrowind is doable, because you can break the game in half with just about any mechanic you pick. So there's never really any suspense as to whether something is possible.

I am in a very similar spot to you. When I built my computer, and when I built my NAS, I didn't bother getting terribly huge storage (1 TB for my desktop, 4 TB for the NAS) on the assumption that I could always upgrade later. Which felt like a safe assumption because for the entire existence of hard drives the price per storage size has always gone down.

Well, now I'm a bit squeezed for space in both places and, whoops, the price has roughly tripled from when I built them in the first place. I am simply not going to spend a thousand dollars upgrading my NAS, so I guess I will just be a bit more judicious in what discs I rip onto there, and maybe be a little more aggressive in my handbreak transcoding to save space.

this complete head loss from a supporter

Unironically saying this situation is like the suffragettes resisting unfair laws is absolutely incredible.

They're somehow the worst books that have the best "naval battles in space" available. Still can't make it past book 6 or 7, or wherever I stopped, but I have yet to find a book that does the actual space ships shooting each other bits as good as it does.

The first pronunciation listed by Merriam Webster is two syllables: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaudeville

Anecdotally I've only ever heard it pronounced with two syllables.

Merriam Webster uses each word in the other word's definition:

champ

verb

transitive verb

1. chomp

2. mash, trample

intransitive verb

1. to make biting or gnashing movements

2. to show impatience of delay or restraint — usually used in the phrase champing at the bit

versus

chomp

verb

intransitive verb

1. to chew or bite on something

2. champ (sense 2 — usually used in the phrase chomping at the bit)

transitive verb

to chew or bite on

So maybe not strictly synonyms but they're pretty damn close in meaning.

I've been officially accepted to sell my board game (Chubby Bear Salmon Gobble) at the Indie Game Night Market at PAXU this year!

To that end, I have reached 734 total fish dice created (60 currently in molds, 300 demolded, 210 sanded, and 164 painted) out of a self imposed goal of 1200 total fish dice for 40 total copies of the game. 30 to sell, and 10 for friends, family, and special cases (like Kyle Ferrin specifically wanting one which is cool as hell). Turns out even if I can make them in batches of 60, 1200 is a lot of dice, and my molds are starting to degrade which might necessitate me making another set before I'm finished, which is pretty annoying. I should have enough silicone left to do that, which is good because it turns out high quality mold making silicone is not cheap.

I'm also trying to figure out what to price these at, because unfortunately the raw material cost of each game is pretty high, which means if I want any chance of even breaking even on the whole adventure I'm going to have to charge people $50-60 per game which feels kinda bad. It turns out there is a reason people are not out there mass producing custom resin dice at home, and also a reason why hand made dice sets go for such a premium.

One of my favorite parts of that series (as much of it as I've read/watched anyway) is how constantly aware Maomao is of the incredibly unequal power dynamics. Like, at the same time that Jinshi is sort of going through a rom com scenario, Maomao is operating with the understanding that she could be put to death on a whim and there's nothing she can do about it. It's sometimes played to comedic effect, but that reality is sort of always there as background radiation.

Yeah, I extremely prefer bandcamp when it's an option. I really wish more bands would put their stuff there. Even if it's not going to generate a ton of money surely it's better than nothing, especially with how limited streaming payouts can be.

You can use Calibre to download books from sites like Amazon/Kindle

Unless things have changed recently that's no longer true. Amazon removed the ability to manually download an ebook to your computer.

My favorite band jizue just released a new album (orbis, it's good, do recommend if you like math rock/jazz sorta stuff) and because I'm a freak about wanting to actually own my music I went through the trouble of importing the physical CD from japan to rip into my collection.

The CD came with a DVD of a liver performance, very cool! It doesn't have their usual pianist though, kind of a bummer. But then I looked up the band she usually plays in, and now I have a new incredibly niche piano centric jazzy band to listen to (EYRIE).

What follows is not really about music and more just an anecdote about trying to buy music...

This sent me down another rabbit hole of trying to purchase their music, which it seems is really not a thing you are expected or encouraged to do these days. EYRIE was selling their music through qobuz, one of the few remaining sites you can actually purchase music through. However, somehow, in the time frame between me adding albums to my cart and checking out, one of the albums was entirely removed from the store.

So then after a bit more hunting, I found the only place I could still actually get it was via iTunes. Which is annoying because in order to purchase something via iTunes you have to be using the actual software, not a web interface, and the software doesn't run on linux. So I have to go get out my laptop that still has windows on it, boot up iTunes, and discover that it won't let me log in. So I go to reset my password and learn that my account has been deactivated, probably because I used it exactly once a couple years ago to purchase another album in a similar set of circumstances. So I go through the process to try and regain access to my account, and a day later get an email just saying, "We've reviewed your request, and access to your account has been denied."

I just want to buy an album! I would like to exchange money for files containing music! I promise this is more profitable than paying for a subscription service! Why is this so difficult?!?

I love to lurk the Star Citizen sub, just endless hobby drama on tap whenever you want it.

One fun thing to note:

a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it (we started Squadron 42 development in 2014 as 2013 was opening studios, hiring people and getting the Hangar module out for Star Citizen)

The original kickstarter finished in November 2012, and Squadron 42 is (still) listed as having an estimated delivery of November 2014. So saying they started work on the game in 2014 is either an example of the persistent relationship Chris Roberts has with deadlines, or an attempt to slightly massage the timeline to make it look marginally better. Either way, fairly funny.

Another funny bit I saw recently is that people were asking one of the devs why high level huge ships were spawning in low level easier missions (to oversimplify a bit), and he responded in part with:

I'm working on rebalancing all ship missions (about 1100 Unique records I have to modify) while trying to do all the other stuff I do for all other content releases and manage my team!

Best case scenario he's phrasing it this way to try and inflate the difficulty and work involved, but reading it directly it sure sounds like this guy is manually going mission by mission through 1100 entries and making changes. Which is just truly bonkers if that's how their internal systems are set up, especially 14 years into the project.

less random than D6 & rerolling ties

What exactly do you mean by this?

Yeah man, unused industrial building is much less of an eyesore.

God this shit sucks so bad, reminding me why I made the decision to mostly step away from social media. The entire discourse centers around someone wanting to author to definitively state a "moral" for their work, just so they can check the "this is socially good art" box and feel good about reading it.

Instead of yelling at the author to collapse their work into a simple "X Bad" statement, maybe try reading it and decide for yourself what the message is intended to be.

Or don't! But don't also go yelling at them online just because other people who also haven't read it are doing so.

Frankly hard to get a larger scale than Agatha Christie, who has sold an estimated two billion books, a number only even potentially rivaled by Shakespeare.

Depending on how far you're willing to go to make this work, you could look into putting KOReader on your kindle. It tends to have much better performance than the native display software (although I no longer use kindle hardware, so I can't speak from first hand experience). It's also infinitely customizable, although the interface to do so is fairly opaque.

Agreed, for my own games I see it as combat being high impact and decisive, not necessarily lethal.

PS - are you the creator of Wallet Dungeons?

I am! Haha, that tiny card remains the most popular thing I've ever made by a significant margin.

Yes, it's probably better to view it as higher potential lethality, rather than a higher actual number of deaths.

In my own experience of games I've run, I've had fewer player deaths in NSR games than otherwise (not counting intentional bloodbaths like one shots in MoSh or Mork Borg).

The threat of death changes how players approach problems: being much more careful, making more plans, taking more precautions, finding ways around combat, etc. If players tried to play Cairn exactly the same way they play 5E I'm sure you'd see a bunch of dead PCs, but when you set expectations properly it doesn't pan out that way.

To OP's point, the potential of deaths is one of the things that helps motivate a greater focus on exploration, travel, negotiation, information gathering, etc. You don't need lethality to achieve this, but it's in the mix.

Interesting, lead being the issue does actually make a lot of sense.