benny
27d ago
I've even payed this one solo twice and it was enjoyable. I think the deck building is a bit underfocused for my preference but the worker placement aspect, which I officially don't like, is fun.
For deck building I just love the designers other big game: Clank catacombs.
benny
1mo ago
That sounds real good. My November so far has also been going well. Maybe it's in the air.
Rock on!
benny
2mo ago
Only water. I usually drink mate tea once per day but when doing those fasts, I also quit that aspect of my life.
I've read that one shouldn't do unsupervised fasts for more than 7-10 days, so that's why I did the last one with 7 days only water and days of broth as supplementation.
benny
2mo ago
I've done proper water fasts twice now. I wouldn't recommend doing anything less than 5 days because the switching cost from glucose to full ketose is the hardest part.
The last one was 10 in total but only 7 of those was water only. The last three days I've supplemented with broth.
For me I'm unable to participate in activities that require physical energy while I'm in the mode but mental energy is high throughout.
benny
2mo ago
I'm team reMarkable. I was on the pre-order for the rM2 years back. It is a glorified notebook, which is what they position it as. I'm not on the latest firmware version, as I don't think the features of fw 3.x are worth it. They are reasonable open with ssh and root access and they respect the free software that they use.
If you already have a digital workflow and you need apps, then this is the wrong choice.
For me it's a notebook for handwritten notes and a koreader eink ebook reader using a small hack.
benny
2mo ago
That's essentially what work used to be for many people. If I don't do X, I will lose my job and this my income.
Nowadays it's a bit strange as there are jobs that can't be qualified and some people don't ever have that fear.
benny
3mo ago
Love the idea for Tinker Tuesday. My entry is aimed at nerdy programmers or people that love text based systems and version control systems:
I'm right now working on an Emacs Major Mode for the jujutsu version control system. My frontend is heavily inspired by magit, which is a git frontend for Emacs and then I mix in the visual organization of the jujutsu command line interface, which I think is well designed.
This is magit's status buffer and I've attached the jujutsu.el status buffer.
I love magit and was initially hesitant to even switch to jj, but the properties that jj brings with it have very quickly converted me to a user. So I needed a cool interface inside Emacs, which is where I do my development work. It's very usable via the command line, but hey.
What this project brought with it is that I've contrary to normal Emacs major mode development is that I've basically built it on the concepts of facebook's early react ideas. I'm using a vDOM and then manipulate the Emacs buffer like a DOM. We'll see if, when I release it, that will see adoption. I think it's a great way to think about visual systems and it maps pretty well to the text only world of Emacs.
My Roadmap before I release the code and announce it for real is:
- process buffer where the command lines that were invoked is shown and the corresponding output by
jj - log and evo log buffer with details like magit-log.
benny
4mo ago
I'm assuming you're taking about the combat system that everyone either copied or riffed on. I think around that time Assassin's Creed 2 is a contender for most influential. I feel every was AC2+++ for awhile.
benny
5mo ago
I'm firmly in the camp of core gameplay loops being very important. But I, like many others am not very consistent with what I like when I try to categorize stuff. I know that I don't care about story in (most) games but I like vignettes.
For example I think for whatever reason it's just fun to move and fight in Spider-Man but the open world POI stuff does nothing for me in general and many missions are just go somewhere and fight people. Whereas I also really liked The Witcher 3 which I don't think has a good core loop and fighting system. (Also not a good main story) but just being in that world and going to different small towns and solving their monster problem was great.
That's singleplayer. In multiplayer it is only gameplay. I could play Quake 3, Counter Strike and Rocket League for 10 years and still like it. But due to life reasons I don't want to play multiplayer anymore, except at Old school LAN parties with the people in the same room. Which I do once a year.
benny
5mo ago
I don't play games for the story, I play games for the individual missions, scenarios or gameplay segments.
Having them contextualized with a small story is fine, but I'm mainly there for the interaction.
benny
5mo ago
Did you put those 400 hours into Helldivers by playing with randoms?
In my mind playing things with people you know is a different thing than playing merely the designer's game. Of course there is an art to get to an engaging level with multiplayer games where you can shoot the shit and the balance if you want to get into competition. But other people are doing a lot of the lifting in my experience. I think the Steam/Twitch flavor of the month, which is often multiplayer shows that groups of online players tend to migrate together and Even after cracking 100 hours they aren't necessarily positive about the game itself. I have a coworker that gets let's say 700 hours playtime while being part of this herd and when I ask him what game he really enjoyed in the last year he often shrugs. Most likely Rocket League, which he plays when the other roamers aren't online.
benny
5mo ago
Hob
I've tried Hob in the past and the performance killed it for me. I may put it on a list when I maybe get the Steam Deck 2. ;-)
benny
5mo ago
Yeah that's basically true but I don't know a 100h game that I would think qualifies. I played Baldur's Gate 3 and The Witcher 3 and thought they were fantastic but they had lots of problems, IMO. The best longest game I have played is God of War: Ragnarok and I don't even understand how they pulled off a relatively long game without the typical soulless Point of Interest splattering that you get from Ubisoft, et. al.
benny
5mo ago
I played Doom 2016 but I'm not a huge fan. I'm sure it's fine but I'm not into singleplayer first person shooters. Even in the days of Max Payne 2 I was more a third person kind of guy than a Half-Life 2 person. So it's nothing specific about Doom. I just like third person games more.
My AAA recommendations is God of War: Ragnarok. It's not short, but it felt great and the optional side quests didn't feel like dumb filler. I think that game did almost everything right, including having people talk constantly which I know is an issue for a lot of people. I was always engaged, I even did a lot of the raven collectibles, because they were fun with the axe throwing arc.
What's hard to communicate is that I don't absolutely philosophically hate long games, if they are very well made but the majority of long games aren't. So it's easier to say I like short games because they are presumably cutting for quality.
benny
5mo ago
I'm not a person that considers video games his primary hobby but I like them. I mostly like shorter games, so I can actually finish them over huge open worlds with 100 hour playtime but only 15 good hours contained within. I wish there was a director's mode where you only get the best missions within a game and just get your "RPG powers" over the course of the missions, like in ye olde linear days.
I bought Cocoon and I can highly recommend it. I didn't have high expectations, despite the good scores it got based on a game with analog stick and only one button controls. Boy have I been proved wrong. This is really good and I don't even love puzzlers.
I also bought Assassin's Creed Mirage because I read it's "only 15 hours" long which is a positive to me. I'm not far and had to play around with all the obnoxious interface stuff. One has to strike a balance between visual clutter with some information content and immersion while losing out on necessary information. I like it OK so far (2 hours in) but as someone that only play 2 AAA games a year, the quality drop-off from the last few games I played (ex. God of War: Ragnarok) in production is very noticeable.
Anyone with similar preferences for length?
benny
5mo ago
Would you recommend KoDP before Six Ages or would you recommend for someone that doesn't play that much to go straight to Six Ages?
benny
6mo ago
It's mostly the concept or a random narrative involving the person. Probably not even a real memory.
When I tried to explain a room we both know then I can iterate around the room clockwise and say the big items in the room but at no point do I have any visuals generated. Being very much influenced by LLM: I can generate an itemization of furniture, but merely because I have a spreadsheet I can go through, but it's all generated on the fly but when my eyes are closed it's just blank.
My partner, based on the red apple test, also doesn't have strong visualization skills. What I noticed is that when my eyes are open I can at some level generate images based on the visual stimuli that is currently present.
Again influenced by AI: Like that Google thing from years back that saw dogs everywhere. But not that obvious and it's still not really visually present but somehow I can get closer to a "visual feel" that way.
What's funny is that I'm partial on the conspiracy train that other people may have the same stimuli but are just making up being able to see and they just claim to be able to see something in their mind's eye. I could fake a detailed red apple and invent blemishes and such. They wouldn't be stable over a period of time because there is no actual "visual" reference but I don't know if the non-aphantasiacs have a stable reference. My wife says her blurry red apple morphs.
benny
6mo ago
This post just made me realize I have aphantasia and I spoke to my partner what she can imagine and then did the apple test.
I was aware of the term but never bothered to investigate. And I'm seemingly affected. What a wild ride.
benny
8mo ago
Germany.
New gender identity law has been passed. Full story: https://www.dw.com/en/gender-identity-law-passes-in-german-parliament/a-68800054
tl;dr: Minor change in last name handling: You can now have a joint name for the family, so children can be born into this world and be called Justin Müller-Westernhagen. Previously the child would've been called either Justin Müller or Justin Westernhagen.
More contentiously: Germany joins Spain when it comes to gender law. From November 2024 forward one can change their gender in their official documentation and first name, no questions asked, once a year.
benny
1yr ago
Baldur's Gate 3. It's amazing. Not finished yet because it's a beast of a game but I'm in obsessed with it.
To me it's one of the best games ever made.
benny
1yr ago
I don't like the third because the scene makes no intuitive sense. Space suit guardian so far from the space shuttle. Is he the equivalent of a full kit wanker? So for me the two top ones remain and I have a slight preference for the first one.
benny
1yr ago
Very much interested in a write up for Spanish, as there are several approaches and I'm not looking forward to subscribe to a glorified flash card service and be vendor-locked into language acquisition.
I take it you are not a fan of "Language Transfer" which is all about producing from the very start.
benny
1yr ago
What dosage do you take off vitamin D? Did you also notice being less groggy upon waking up in the morning?
benny
1yr ago
The standard argument around here presented in enjoyable (to me) book form: A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
The standard argument around here presented in video form: Ben Felix on YouTube.
And if you can tolerate more risk you can always lever the index funds to get more swings.
I took a 3 month break from my jujutsu.el VCS Emacs mode and only restarted continuing on it because in three different online places, as someone that isn't a lot in online spaces, I got pinged about it. There must've been a new Hacker News post about jujutsu. Haven't seen it, but for the programmers out there, I can still highly recommend jujutsu and the command line interface is pretty neat, which is why my project is not as essential as when using git.
Got a bit farther with the vDOM aspect of the text editor interface. It was already done 3 months ago but only rendering every frame from scratch. Now I've worked on a diffing reconciler, to improve performance for cases that I haven't encountered yet but someone will.
I uploaded it to github but I'm explicitly not interested in collaboration, because this is my eccentric way of doing things and I'm still exploring functional/data-driven paradigms and how they can apply to Emacs. Let me tell you, after working with persistent data structures for 7 years and then going back to doing place-oriented programming is a bitch.
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