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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4179 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What chocolate do people here recommend? A piece of chocolate every few evenings is my only non-negotiable vice, and most american chocolate is fucking awful. I'd be willing to get some shipped from Belgium if it's good enough.

I generally don't eat chocolate, but 100% dark chocolate has a powerful (and very bitter) taste that even in 'darker' chocolates is masked by the sugar. Chocolate in medium-sized amounts has a caffeine-like, but significantly less strong.

I don't eat chocolate, I drink cocoa. Have tried buying more expensive cocoa powder at times, but honestly have not managed to find a noteworthy taste difference.

Not sure if it's the same thing in the US, but I'm guessing the dark chocolate for confectionary purposes sold in e.g. Costco in huge bars with say, 70% cocoa solids might be pretty good.

I once surprised my young sister by buying her a 1 kg bar of such from Metro for the grand price of $10 and she seemed very happy with it. Supposedly it tasted very similar to 70% dark chocolate of the same type made by Lindt. (that's the default brand of 'quality' chocolate sold in eastern Europe, usually 3$ for 120 g or so. Cheap chocolate is 1$ per 100g )

Thanks, I'll give that a try! I've been trying to find decent cocoa powder too, because swiss miss tastes pretty meh. Tried to mix my own cocoa with sugar and powdered milk, but could never get it quite right.

Oh, you tried making your own chocolate! That's probably doable but tricky.

I've given up on eating chocolate on account of preserving my teeth, I was drinking lightly sweetened cocoa and it harmed them less, and once I switch to artificial sweeteners there's really no observable effect on teeth. That is, I believe I can feel whether something's bad for the teeth depending on how the inside of my mouth feels.

Is getting wasted still worth it to you?

I feel I’ve come to a point where, though I used to love drinking heavily and partying, the trade off is just no longer worth it. The hangovers are now exponentially worse than what I had to deal with in the past. Luckily I don’t deal with three day hangovers though, as I’ve heard others report.

Part of this is probably socially mediated, as I grow older and my peer group binge drinks less and less. That makes getting wasted less fun, and means you bear the risk of acting the fool if you go too far. Also, you can’t commiserate about your hangover with your compatriots.

At this point I don’t really know why I get extremely drunk, ever. I still do it occasionally, but it seems for the past year or two I always regret it. As I said above, the trade off just doesn’t make the cut.

I do still enjoy having a couple beers most nights, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I think my days of heavy drinking, chasing some fuzzily and probably inaccurately remembered fun times from college, are over.

I only drink socially. This weekend I (middle age past 30) did a bar crawl with coworkers and I certainly got to the point where I shouldn't drive, but I ended up not having any significant hangover as 1) I ended early and b) I started adding water between drinks to prevent cell dehydration.

Getting completely wasted was something I stopped doing in college because I hate having my weekends stolen from me as they're too useful to be squandered on alcohol recovery. Working a full workweek makes the weekends more precious since it's the most time you can dedicate to self health, hobbies, persona development, etc. Also, being able to remember the night with a group of friends is just so much better than getting plastered.

Is getting wasted still worth it to you?

I feel I’ve come to a point where, though I used to love drinking heavily and partying, the trade off is just no longer worth it. The hangovers are now exponentially worse than what I had to deal with in the past. Luckily I don’t deal with three day hangovers though, as I’ve heard others report.

I used to party pretty hard and one reason was because I didn't get hungover at all. Then I started getting small hang-overs in my mid 20s that progressively got worse and graduated to the 3-day kind in my 30s.

It becomes kind of hard justifying drinking hard one evening when you have to spend multiple days being miserable afterwards, especially when moderate drinking doesn't have this problem and is fun as well. Now I try to stick to not drinking more than 5-7 pints (or equivalent) an evening when drinking and it works out well for me.

I do still enjoy having a couple beers most nights, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I think my days of heavy drinking, chasing some fuzzily and probably inaccurately remembered fun times from college, are over.

I feel like there is sometimes some conflation of chasing the buzz of alcohol/partying and chasing youth.

Those times in college probably aren't as misremembered as you think and drinking probably helped make them fun. Partying with your friends when you're young is just hard to beat though, regardless of whether you're drunk or sober.

Chasing the dragon isn't a mistake because "the dragon never existed", it did, it's a mistake because you're not going to catch it again.

It's not the hangovers that bother me, it's the hours after drinking. But maybe that's because I tend to drink early in the day if I drink at all. After a few hours I just get a headache and feel tired and sometimes a bit sick. That's with like 4-7 drinks over the course of a few hours. It's hard to thread the needle between feeling the nicest phase of intoxication and drinking too much such that you feel shitty later in the day.

I've followed the same rhythm since about my junior year of undergrad: I don't like drinking, I don't drink for a while, my memories of prior parties fade the negative and accentuate the positive, I think "gee, I haven't partied in a while", I go out with friends and get absolutely hammered, I think "thank God that's out of my system, don't ever need to do that again." So I'm good for a hangover every two to six months.

On the other hand, my wife and I get absolutely couchlocked vaping weed once a week or so. So, idk it might all be transmuting itself, I'm still getting fucked up somewhere. But if I avoid eating an entire jar of queso or a rack of ribs or something, no hangover or aftereffects the next morning.

Don't know. Haven't been drunk once.

I get something like throbbing pressure in my frontal lobes after more than 200-300 ml of hard liquor or beer equivalent.

Sorry to hear that, but it may be for the best.

I'm content with having a low tolerance for alcohol, it makes getting a nice buzz going cheaper.

I typically drink about 40 ml of pure alcohol daily in some form.

Interesting! That does sound very useful. Now I'm jealous...

I'm wondering what causes the effect. Perhaps it's purely psychological.

I'm on the wrong side of my 20s, which is what I've heard a lot of people claim is the time when you can't really handle your liquor like you used to.

Can't say I feel that yet, I rarely have hangovers even after heroic amounts of liquor because I make it a point to stay hydrated throughout. And ideally sleep through the hangover if I suspect it's due.

In fact, I feel like my partying has barely started, didn't have any time for it in med school, now that I'm in the UK it's time to embrace day drinking and functional alcoholism ;)

Hah more power to you bud! I wonder if it’s less about age and more about novelty/repetitiveness. I could imagine the reality being that hangovers feel about the same, I’ve just had so many I’ve gotten tired of them. Also commiserating with friends really does make hangovers more bearable.

What’s your favorite drink? I had a Long Island iced tea last night for the first time in a while and it was a damn good way to start the night.

Tough question, I usually drink to get smashed rather than for taste, and while I've had some rather expensive drinks, I find myself rather underwhelmed most of the time.

I happen to be found of LIITs myself, but in terms of favorites it would a toss up between a non-bitter pinà colada and Smirnoff Pink.

But at the end of the day, if it's got ethanol in it I'll drink it haha

Same here.

Having primarily focused on C-style programming, getting into Logo was a mind-breaker. I could do things the way I did them in other languages by emulating one line of C as three lines of Logo, or I could do them more simply by thinking it through just a little bit more and doing them the proper Logo way. I was able to create a program I’ve been dreaming of for twenty years in two weeks with Logo.

So then I discovered Logo is a Lisp-style language minus some parentheses. Now I begin to see what people mean when they call Lisp the most elegant programming language on Earth. Writing C++ is like working with a compliant and obedient robot; writing Logo is like ballroom dancing with logic itself.

How do you feel about Haskell?

I feel I need to learn me a Haskell.

I was going to link it if you didn’t.

Maybe it's my autism, but I really love C programing. Anything else feels like I'm wearing oven mits or something.

I love the feeling of directly interfacing with the hardware C gives me; that I can actually understand what the compiler turns each line into. I love a 5000 line behemoth that took weeks to write and debug and test and rewrite and debug and restart from the beginning that I KNOW, for a fact, to be perfectly optimized for X.

That said, holy shit is it faster to write some stuff in lisp adjacent languages or clunky kludged together jank piles like python.

I love the feeling of directly interfacing with the hardware C gives me

Obligatory article: C Is Not a Low-Level Language

I will say most of the word in there are general attacks on all languages that aren't interpreted, and C and it's flavors are still closer to metal than all them and all it's competitors. Also, I challenge you to find anyone that has run one of the baked in concurrency languages dude talks about at work instead of with 5 year olds without looking like those before and after picks of obama.

That said, oof on memory. Just pretend your symbolic address is direct and go in blissful ignorance.

I've watched some episodes of Archer from the 11th season, and I'm amazed the show is still good. There were some weak seasons, but 11th one started out strong and kept going strong.

It's often somewhat adult humor, so not suitable for traditionally minded people.

In case you don't know anything about it, here's the first 5 minutes.

I lost interest when they started parodying other genres, they were still usually pretty funny, but weren't what I signed up to see. I'll have to check out the new season, thanks.

Where you draw the line at what is the same species or is not the same species is rather arbitrary. One definition is that two animals are not the same species if they cannot have fertile offspring; but there are lots of animals like that that we happily classify as different species, like lions and tigers. I think the more commonly used definition is that two animals are different species if they do not mate in the wild. And as I understand it, bonobos and chimpanzees very rarely mate in the wild.

Indeed. By the nature of evolution, closely related species blur at the edges. Interfertility remains the main criterion to distinguish species, but it's neither binary (there are many degrees of non-interfertility: won't mate > will mate but not conceive > will conceive but not carry to term > hybrids are born malformed > hybrids are healthy but sterile > hybrids are fertile but have lower fitness) nor transitive (see ring species, where A is interfertile with B and B with C, but C is not interfertile with A). Besides, most species are named on morphological or genetical grounds, because checking interfertility with their relatives would be impractical. And of course many species are exclusively asexual and do not mate at all -- just look at the mess that is bacterial taxonomy, where populations of a single "species" can be more genetically diverse than mammals and fish.

So dogs wolves and coyotes are so the same thing then?

https://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/courses/spring2019/biol/biol312section2/content/are-coyotes-wolves-and-dogs-really-separate-species

Apparently wolves and coyotes very rarely mate in the wild, so they would be different species.

The infamous comparison was between red wolves and coyotes, and red wolves evolved from a mix of coyotes and grey wolves.

If we talk grey wolves and coyotes, I think the differences are larger, but don't know how much larger.

Whether they can interbreed isn't the whole deal. You can breed horses and donkeys, after all.

There's a significant genetic difference but I'm not 100% sure on that. Like way bigger than between human races.

The divergence between the two species is really rather old it seems.

https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aag2602

Wikipedia says they’ve got 0.4% genetic difference from vanilla chimps. Not sure if thats a lot or how it compares to their % difference from humans.

I think the separate geographical regions (due to a huge river) helps them get classed as separate?

It also is worth mentioning that the species was originally separated based on skull information, before genetic studies and decades before the social/sexual research.

Are there any good fantasy show produced in recent years that are not anime?

Lord of the Rings is actually really good; IF you don't mind them playing fast and loose with cannon dates and some GoT style bloody titillation that doesn't quite fit with the movies or books (it's not too gratuitous, but it is there. It's the only place you could really feel the heavy hand of the executive).

I wasn't sure on my feelings while I was watching it vis. some pacing issues and where the camera was looking, but the last couple episodes made me really appreciate the whole thing.

The Last Kingdom is not technically fantasy but it's set in England in the dark ages and has similar vibes. Very well made show and complete.

The Magicians is pretty good, sort of an urban fantasy show. It's a bit 'woke' especially the last season but I found it tolerable.

House of the Dragon was kind of okay. Almost good if you compare it to other TV. I did't like the Witcher much, but others with decent taste did so .. I dunno.

The Witcher show is dead, Henry Cavill left. They may make another season but I doubt it'll be any good replacing the main actor.

Didn't they make 2 or 3 seasons though ?

I found it boring so stopped watching after a couple of episodes.

Not surprised at all that they hated the source material.

Sapkowski is a cynical, wise asshole who's reputed to be something of a lecher.

The entire setting is not very thinly disguised eastern European history, where every single ethnicity behaved like complete bastards at times, and everyone is suspicious of each other.

Something like that breaks the mind of the typical product of American universities; surely there must be some good guys? Persecuted minorities can't be assholes themeselves, no.

Come on.

It’s being compared to Game of Thrones. All your strawman criticisms would apply there too. Yet GoT was both well-produced (at first) and wildly popular, even among those pearl-clutching college grads.

GoT came out when these pearl-clutching college grads were less pearl-clutching. They've been escalating for years.

How does your theory fit with House of the Dragon?

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Found this the other day (actually in a tweet by @ymeskhout), it's a game where you play as a paperclip maximizer. Apparently it's from like 2017 or something but I only just heard of it.

Anyway, good way to blow like 5 hours.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

It's just a cookie clicker skin, no?

It's got some interesting plot twists but if you don't like that sort of number-go-up game it's not worth it.

Just half a decade late, no biggy.

xkcd 1053

In the meantime, a racist parody game of the Paperclip Maximizer game was developed that copies the mechanics but replaces the paperclips with the holy cows of the new religion. (I shall not elaborate nor provide links, that'd be CW; if you know you know)

https://chadnet.org/bantu/

Funny, lol.

I went sport clay shooting for the first time last weekend. It was a ton of fun. I was worried about having a sore shoulder, but it wasn't really an issue. The instructor / range safety officer showed me a good stance and I think that helped mitigate the soreness that might have happened. I went with 5 other guys, and although most of them had shot once or twice before, I think I did the best of everyone. There were times when I got the right stance and it felt really natural. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes shooting.

I’m sorry to hear it. Is this America?

Yeah, a big city with very restrictive gun laws.

He looks to be Polish, but while Polish gun laws are a bit more restrictive, you can probably still get a gun permit.

A Polish friend had to get one for some long guns and I believe she did manage it.

My first shooting experience was skeet.

The guy teaching was a casual competition shooter and supplied a double-barrel shotgun in what I assume was .410. He taught us basic handling on a fixed target and then started loading up the throwing houses. We loaded one barrel and tried for one at a time but towards the end started casting the left-right pair. Sweep one way for the first, acquire, then sweep back the other way to catch the second. Hitting both was incredibly validating. As you said, it feels really natural, like the gun is just an extension of your line-of-sight.

And yes, getting a good stance and really sealing the butt to your shoulder is the best way to avoid bruising. You want it to decelerate into your muscle immediately rather than get up to speed and then meet resistance.

I'd love to try it again. This weekend you may have just convinced me to go to the regular range.

Having tried to shoot clays with a .410 Henry lever-action, I can indeed confirm that .410 is nigh-impossible to hit clays with. That being said, as per C&Rsenal's It's a Trap! series, Winchester did make a boy's clay shooting kit that did include a single-shot, break-action .410 gun. Guess expectations were just different in the 19th Century.

It does seem too small. 12-gauge is apparently the standard, but I’m almost positive that we were shooting something smaller...

I went pheasant hunting last week. A few times I didn't hold the shotgun right and gave myself the biggest bruise on my arm, but I got the hang of it. Getting instruction is definitely the right way to go.

What do you call that annoying thing where a work that self-consciously sets out to puncture that narrative of one historical figure/group goes on to quite obviously parrot the self-serving tripe of another historical figure/group? It's a sort of in-work Gell Mann Amnesia or dissonance, where an author seems to forget that the whole point of his work was to tell us the real dope, the inside story. Or like leveraging oneself so thoroughly against one figure that one ends up taking another figure's bullshit at face value. I feel like I'm not expressing my point well, so I'll give some examples.

-- In Robert Caro's monumental biographies, he often punctures legends of both Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. "Johnson often said he was a wandering farm laborer in California, but really he was angling to become a lawyer while practicing law without a license at 19 years old." That sort of thing. But then Caro will give us a quick biography of another figure, Sam Rayburn or Al Smith, and repeat absolute whoppers that they told about their lives. The "Walked fifteen miles uphill both ways to school" stuff, the "never even let a lobbyist buy him lunch" stuff.

-- In the latest season of The Crown, which goes to great lengths to reveal the inner scandals of the Royal family and paint them as absurd and self-centered, they introduced Mohammed and Dodi Fayed. When Dodi is born, his father holds him and gives the kind of soliloquy that no one has ever given in real life, but that an egotist or his biographer would claim to have given at a key moment. The speech is like something Thucydides or Plutarch would put into someone's mouth.

-- Revisionist historians who, in their quest to puncture American mythology, take the Soviets or the Nazis propaganda at face value.

Is Robert Caro where the "walked fiften miles uphill both ways through snow" thing came from?

The whole chapters on Rayburn that I'm reading right now in "the path to power." It's all stories right from Rayburn about his youth on the farm, giving speeches in barns to cows. As greyenlightenment pointed out "the power broker" is hella long so I don't want to rely on memory too hard, but I recall the sections on Al Smith and to a lesser extent la Guardia being much friendlier than the coverage of Moses.

Anyone going to the san diego meetup tomorrow?

The Solstice?

Not the San Diego one, but I'm going to a local rationalist solstice.

Last time, when I attended the ACX meetup, I met a ton of cool people and had some refreshing non-CW discussions.

What video games are people playing?

I just finished the Outer Wilds after picking it up on sale, and wow, that game was incredible. The ending actually made me cry, something I haven't experienced in a video game in almost a decade.

I usually don't go for narrative driven/mystery type games, but Outer Wilds is truly in a class of it's own. I've heard Return of Obra Dinn is similar quality, as well as Disco Elysium, so I'm curious to check those out.

What video games are people playing?

I pretty much only play games with my girlfriend in recent years, so I'm always on the lookout for non-singleplayer games. Lately, we've started playing Guild Wars 2. It scratches that MMO nostalgia itch that's been lost for me ever since WoW circa 2005 and WoW Classic before they added expansions to it.

GW2 is still going strong ten years in, with regular expansions and a very active playerbase. I like the music, the frequent rewards that make dopamine-tickling pleasant sounds and visual effects, the spontaneous cooperation that dynamic world events create, and the massive world pvp system reminiscent of something like WoW's Alterac Valley but on a far grander scale. My girlfriend likes the thousands of skins and dyes to play dress-up with, basically. I mean, she enjoys the rest of the game too, but... y'know.

Great to hear! Gaming with a partner is always nice. We really enjoyed It Takes Two and divinity original sin 2 if you’re looking for other coop games.

Unity of Command 2: Desert Fox DLC - Rommel's North African campaign with 2 alt history scenarios (One for taking Tobruk and one for failing Tobruk but taking Malta). A lot of fun to play the opposite side after the Desert Rats campaign.

Victoria 3 - It's not polished but I played way too much Vicky 2 and it's just satisfying to maximize the Standard of Living for my pops

Darktide - 40k Horde-shooter. Dreamed for a long time about a game like this finally coming out.

Persona 5 on PC - JRPG's at their best.

Anno 1800 finally came out for steam so I'm hoping to finally try the anno games for the first time.

And at some point go back and get around to actually reading Chaos:head Noah.

New Path of Exile league started yesterday and I intend to sink at least the weekend into entirely. If you like the mechanics of using loot to buy stuff to get more loot to buy better to stuff to get even more loot it's the pinnacle of the genre. If you don't understand why some people genuinely seem to mechanically like capitalism this is the game that gets you most in the mind of a capitalist(Yes, even more so than Eve online in my opinion)

I will add that the currencies in PoE aren't merely gold or silver like in most RPGs. The currencies are different types of orbs that serve a desirable function in and of themselves, typically to modify gear. For example, one orb randomly changes the attributes of an item; another orb adds one more attribute to an existing item; and so on. The value of an orb (expressed in terms of how many of some other orb it's worth) isn't fixed - it's whatever someone is willing to give you for it. As you'd expect, these exchange rates eventually settle into a rough consensus based on community-wide supply and demand.

The use of currency as a practical entity in and of itself also especially aids players who choose to forego trading altogether - there's even a mode you can enroll into called solo self-found in which trading does not exist.

Personally, I'm excited to see how this league's new optional mode - Ruthless - turns out. In Ruthless mode, item and currency drops are massively reduced compared to the usual lootsplosion of the base game. I think there's far too much loot in the base game, and as someone who likes to find my own gear rather than buy it, I don't like how impractical it is to sift through all the garbage on the ground on the 1-in-1,000 off-chance it's something decent.

Wait, so is the average value similar, or are Ruthless players just self-handicapping? What's the upside?

My brother picked up PoE this league, and I was considering joining him. But I have this sneaking suspicion that I'll just be piloting someone else's PoB settings through a bunch of levels. Not sold on that.

My brother picked up PoE this league, and I was considering joining him. But I have this sneaking suspicion that I'll just be piloting someone else's PoB settings through a bunch of levels. Not sold on that.

The build may be theirs. The loot is yours, the trades, the items you acquire, and the other builds those items enable. PoE does an absolutely amazing job of having the gear impact your playstyle; the variety of builds is amazing. My favorite of all time was probably the old Chains of Command / Writhing Jar Flaskfinder build, which generated a snowballing hurricane of animated artifact swords with which to Cuisinart the mob population of a map.

Also, how you play it is on you. The game also does a very good job of striking a balance between chill mob slaughter, and sudden spikes of significant difficulty. A decent build can handle most things, but there's a whole variety of ways to push things just a little too far, with disastrous consequences. The gameplay feels like it has a fair bit more mechanical complexity than Diablo 3 or similar games. The endgame presents a whole lot of problems, and a lot of the best mitigations require well-timed action on the part of the player.

I've been bouncing in and out of the game for years now, and it does have its problems. The regular patch schedule will break your stuff, sooner or later. This last time around, the Exalt/Divine swap was the breaking point for me, throwing a serious wrench into my long-term wealth accumulation, right after I felt like I was recovering from the fated items removal.

Eh. If you're at all interested, I'd recommend giving it a try. It's far and away the best version of diablo anyone's ever managed to make.

I've just always felt like if I'm playing someone else's build I'm not really the one playing. Like, why not just watch a streamer at that point.

I have 1000 hours into PoE, so it's not like I just don't like the game or whatever. Maybe it's just an idiosyncrasy of mine. I'm the same way in card games like Hearthstone. I will not follow someone's deck. Why would I even play at that point?

Interesting! I'm the exact opposite; I use other peoples' builds in pretty much every game that allows them. I've tried making my own, but the truth is for POE I'm there for the loot, and figuring out trading is more than challenging enough. When you've got a guide, you still have to actually implement it, and that means finding enough value to get the gear, and that's an adventure in and of itself.

I feel like loot (by which I think we both mean currency) isn't a challenge because you can get it trivially without any risk. And at that point, you're just boringly grinding. Of course, you can choose to engage in harder content for more loot per hour, but you don't really have to because you can just grind easier content. And if the loot isn't a challenge, and your build wasn't really "yours" to begin with, at what point do you do anything that you're proud of and that you're responsible for? That's what I feel like is missing by just buying and following a build.

If you don't choose to do harder content then... you don't choose to be challenged? That sounds like it's not the game's fault.

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Oh it's absolutely self-handicapping. There's no upside except for people who find it fun, whether because they like the challenge or they want gear drops to feel meaningful (in this case by way of scarcity).

I'm a fan of the idea of ruthless. I think I will eventually play it, but not until I get bored of the main league.

Darktide with buddies, Infinity: Battlespace on my own. Was sick for most the week, picked up a number of games but put them all back down fairly quickly.

Also received a gift of Dwarf Fortress, which I'm looking forward to but I need to do some reading up on it to remember how it works. It's been a while.

Playing Cyberpunk 2077. Been meaning to review it here.

It's really pretty good. Story/quest wise. Graphics too. I don't like the progression system, but the combat's fun and challenging.

I've been in modded Minecraft a good bit. The modded Fabric multiplayer server I'd been working with kinda fell apart while I was offline for work reasons, not that far from the typical start-of-school-season life cycle for those things, so starting from scratch.

Mostly been running a single-player 1.12 Forge Sky2Void instance. It's rough in a few ways, both boring ones like typos, and some less polished broader balance problems, but the central loop of finding new materials and equipment as you break through challenges is fun.

A month back I set up a server to try out the in-development Valhelsia 5 pack. After years of not playing MC it was hard to tell what was modded. Whether the core 1.19 or the mods, a lot of the systems that were skeletal when last I played have gotten rich, robust progression and mechanics.

I almost want to set up a lighter modpack that keeps the gear and loot and worldgen, but only a few of the tech mods. Some of the more 1800s ones really fit the vanilla Minecraft aesthetic better than others. Also, Create is an absolute miracle of a mod.

But delving into modpack assembly...feels like much more than I want to commit at the moment. That way lies madness.

Modpack assembly's less bad now than in the 1.7 or 1.6 days, from a technical side. There's inevitably some dependency-hunting that the launcher should be more able to help resolve, but once that's done you're almost always going to get a loading game with a valid world (at least in Forge/Fabric).

From a design side, and picking the right mods for what you're interested in sticking with... that can be a deep rabbit hole.

Vanilla's gotten better, and it avoids a lot of the 'big empty world of nothing' feeling that earlier generations often had if you weren't so much into building megastructures. Admittedly, to have other different incomplete systems bolted on instead, but at least the useless fletching-table and near-useless copper are. There's been some controversy, but the villager, map, and dye colors rework alone make going back to older versions a lot harder than I expect every time.

Valhelsia's not bad as kitchen-sink packs go, but it's very crowded feeling and always feels a little unpolished to me. But if you're an explorer, they're one of the better options in terms of giant modded-structures outside of Yet Another Twilight Forest Run.

Create's amazing. Most vanilla-like mods tends to be pretty subtle, even if they've got a ton of content (eg, Quark), while most major new system mods can feel glued-on poorly-at-best (ThermalExpansion) to outright disruptive (AppliedEnergistics has a lot of sins to answer for). The closest serious competitors I can remember are ThaumCraft 4 and Immersive Engineering, but Create's at a whole different level. I wouldn't recommend it for your first modded playthrough for a few different reasons (not least of all that it's built around an old version now), but Create:Above and Beyond does some really interesting things that are worth seeing if you enjoy the automation ecosystem.

Afraid I don't have too many not-obvious recs for 1.18 or 1.19 right now. Of the big names, Create Flavored doesn't really look polished enough for me to be comfortable reccing it for someone's first pack. Bliss is fantastic if you add Create in, (and doing so is just dropping Create and Flywheel), but it's also a very specific sort of play that you can probably guess in a glance (and the worldgen is a little boring). The custom 1.18 pack (h/t to KirinDave) I'd given some code on from the last server probably count or be close (arguably can also drop Requiem/HexCraft/Yttr), but it's Fabric, a little more multiplayer oriented, and overworld worldgen was pretty intentionally left alone.

Single Player:

  • RDR2 - About time

  • God of War (PC) - Overrated

Online:

  • CSGO - Used to play at a high level. Play nowadays to kill time. Fucked up my high school grades, still can't let it go.

  • AOM - Kind of like SC2 but slower paced, good for people who aren't hardcore into RTS, play with buddies.

  • GTAO - Hop on a jet and grief some kids.

I'm playing Grounded right now. Fun action survival RPG. The aesthetic is basically "Honey I shrunk the kids". Mechanics feels polished and fun, building is fun and there is no "portal" mechanic like in some survival games, instead you create zip lines to traverse the yard quickly. But creating those zip lines means building tall bases on 'mountains', or building massive towers.

I haven't touched it in a while, admittedly, but I really enjoyed MudRunner. It's a simple(-ish) game about driving Russian(?) trucks off-road and delivering logs. There's something both mindful and mindless about it, you enter this state of awareness and flow where the act of driving is just as much about the travel as it is just getting from point A to point B. A lot of it is just figuring out when and where is the best time to activate AWD or the diff locks (or just turn on both and hold down W all the way), but it's moving all the pieces (or, rather, the trucks) around, planning the strategy for moving them around, and working towards the delivery that's the real meat of the game to me.

I also tried DX-Ball 2: 20th Anniversary Edition, which I gather to be a re-release of an Amiga-flavored brick-breaker game (think Arkanoid), and it really stands out for the oh-so-of-its-time visuals and music (and boy, do I mean music, it's pure 90's soundtracker techno/trance goodness).

Your MudRunner description makes me think of ΔV: Rings of Saturn. It's a fairly hard sci-fi game about...well, mining the rings. Outfit your ship with mass drivers and RCS thrusters. Dive into the rings and match velocity with some ringroids before swallowing them with your cargo bay. Don't turn too fast or reverse with the doors open; all that ore still has inertia. This core loop is kind of soothing and the music and visuals are well-done.

Also, the "demo" on Steam is actually the full game right now, so it's free. You might enjoy it.

I actually added that game to my library recently thanks to Yogscast's Jingle Jam bundle. For 35 GBP, you get like 80+ games, and that's among them.

Dwarf Fortress. It's finally on Steam, replete with graphics, user interface, and a host of QoL changes. It's beautifully emergent in a way unmatched by any other game. There are obviously still some flaws, but there has also never been a better time to learn.

Before that released, I was mostly playing XCOM Long War Rebalanced, a mod for a mod for the Firaxis tactics/strategy game. I enjoyed it quite a bit and expect to come back to it once I've lost a fortress or two.

edit: hell, I didn't scroll down quite far enough to see the XCOM 2 and DF responses...

Hah quite a few people have mentioned DF on this, surprised how many Mottizens play it! I was expecting more EVE.

Outer Worlds

..that's an entirely different game, and one that was very disappointing due to bad writing and other issues, I gather.

Fallout NV has a 'kill anyone', there's even an achievement tied to noshing down on most of the plot-crucial characters.

Yet I'd not call the story 'super generic'.

kill anyone

Only game to flesh this out has to be Arcanum. Of course, you’d better be playing a necromancer if you want to interrogate the dead for plot hooks...

I thought it was quite entertaining actually. Not super long or groundbreaking, but a fun romp and interesting world.

It could be down to how picky we are. I remember checking some of the let's plays and didn't like what I saw so gave it a pass.

After all, there's till time to do a playthrough of Underrail on dominating. (i'm 2/3rds through, goes fairly well)

so I wonder what the overlap with Outer Worlds would be.

There's also no combat system in the Outer Wilds. (assuming that's what you mean)

There are some 'race against time' aspects, but I actually found it rather relaxing, and that seems to be the general vibe I've heard from others who'e played it. I mean, at the end of the day the only real challenge in the game is platforming under a bit of time pressure, but because you can just quit, go to another area, and come back, I didn't find it frustrating at all.

The loop is 22 minutes, but the world is... easily accessible? It's big, but most areas you can get to in 2-3 minutes max once you learn how.

Got into VR recently, so I've been playing Beat Saber and Skyrim VR. Looking to see about setting up Elite Dangerous for VR in the near future.

For Beat Saber, I can get why most people who try it love it. I'm not usually much for rhythm games but it's quite fun and surprisingly decent cardio. Main complaint is that I don't like enough of the songs on offer to give it staying power. Looking into custom maps, just concerned most will be tuned to too high of a difficulty level.

For Skyrim VR (admittedly modded with what are generally regarded as "the essentials"), it's wild how different an experience it is and how new it feels given the hours I've already dropped into the non-VR version. The feeling of just wandering around the world and delving into dungeons is great. It has made me very hopeful for Elite Dangerous- my favorite part of that has always been exploration and I feel like VR will enhance that greatly.

Not sure if you're into horror, but SOMA's narrative is very well done if you're looking for a game with a good story (yes, I will drop this game in every game recommendation request in the Friday Fun Thread). Its plot is unsettling to say the least, its atmosphere succeeds at evoking a palpable sense of isolation and loneliness, and it's perhaps the piece of entertainment which got me into more serious sci-fi that deals with big themes. They might be nothing new for people who've spent enough time on forums with a futurist bent (such as LessWrong), but I still find the way it tackles these ideas to be particularly effective.

I wasn't expecting too much depth from this game when it came out since the creators' only big games before this one were the Amnesia and Penumbra games, but this game's ending had me vacantly staring into space for a while in a good way.

Looks great, and on sale for less than $5 with tax right now. Picked it up thanks!

I know this isn't what you're trying to get at but I'm still playing some far older games. The couple that come to mind are:

  • Company of Heroes 2. Totally underrated game, some of the most fantastic and dynamic multiplayer gaming out there. I've been playing it continuously for years even with some really bad patches that enabled cheese. While I'm not very good now I've gotten into the top ~100 level leaderboard at some points. A sequel just got delayed that I'm.... kind of excited about? It's hard to tell because the alpha was so polished and they're changing the keyboard mappings pretty dramatically. Huge upgrade over things like starcraft - the game actually requires tactics and strategy instead of APM.

  • Orcs must Die 3. Not particularly complex, but really cathartic popcorn. 1st person tower defense. It's the a regression in the series unfortunately (OMD2 was excellent) but for popping on and zoning out with a light shooter + puzzle it can't be beat.

  • Factorio. There have been some great updates. I fell in love with the game more than I have in almost anything in the past 10 years but I just couldn't stomach how much it felt like work. I actually started doing side-contracting as a result of recognizing how much mental effort I was putting into a game for free. Now I have an additional $10k in my pocket but since that's paused I'm thinking of going back....

I like older games as well. Never played any of these (besides a factorio demo) but OMD sounds kind of fun.

I pretty much am always playing at least a little bit of EU4 or CK or battle tech mods (currently roguetech) or bannerlord or TW Warhammer. I'm hoping for a good sale on CK 3 or TW Warhammer 3 for the Christmas or lunar new year sale.

Lately, I've been trying to make the Mediterranean Aragon's mare nostrum, (next up will be Castile (I thought the union marriage would be too easy). Genoa is mine integration of Naples is about to begin and I have a bunch of vassal marches in northern Africa.

Then I'll plow through the Mamluks and start plotting ways to crack France and the Ottomans. Having Castile and Portugal being me the wealth of the new world made money simple, so far.

I'm kinda stuck doing the same playthroughs in EU4 after getting the Ideas Guy achievement. A big and easy custom nation:

  • Ibadi mamluks starting with most of Sunda Islands (with Mings being the only challenge)

  • grand empire (or Solomonic empire before the latest patch) custom Byz (with the claims you get the only challenge with this is pacing yourself and not getting too much AE)

  • grand empire (or Solomonic empire before the latest patch) custom orthodox Italy (with the Alpine forts even the coalitions are a joke)

  • Ibadi mamluk African nation with Siberian frontiers and +3 to colonial development (the Ideas Guy start)

  • High American nation with Siberian frontiers and +3 to colonial development (haven't settled on the most broken government type for this country yet)

I've tried playing "real" countries, but they are so... unoptimized compared to custom cheese.

I hear you, my last big playthrough was to get frozen assets, but I've never done a custom nation, I'll have to give that a try some time.

I'm an Anbennar man. There's actually more content in the mod than in base EU4 with all DLCs, they surpassed the number of focus trees a while ago. The focus trees tend to be better, you get more variety, magic, artificers and a bit of narrative. I find it more sustainable too, the great/mythic conquerors feature makes worthy adversaries for you to slay. Getting to Great Power no.1 ends the game for me but mythic conquerors on strong nations can provide threat even into the lategame.

https://sites.google.com/view/anbennar-missions/missions/cannor-western?pli=1

Sounds like we have similar taste in games (and objectives, in any strategy game where I get territory on the Mediterranean coast I have an unshakeable urge to Mare Nostrum it).

In the past I've found myself in a bit of a loop with CK, Total War and Bannerlord where I go to the next one when I feel what is lacking from the current one. Something like: Bannerlord, but the diplomacy and kingdom management is lacking so -> CK, but then the battles are too automated so -> TW, but then I wish I was more in the thick of it so -> Bannerlord and repeat, not always in that exact order. Throwing in the occasional medieval-ish RPG for good measure. I have been greatly tempted by the CK3 mod where you fight the battles in Bannerlord, but I've heard it is a bit of a hot mess currently.

Yeah, every once in a while I think about that CK mod, or one that let you play them in a TW battle, but then I realize that I'm not sure I'd really want another method to give the player a pretty significant advantage. That said a really good union of those two would be fun!

I always start some game of CK thinking oh this time I'm playing tall, investing in my lands and crusading, and then my life does something unforgivably dumb or I accidentally inherit italy or something and then it's back to painting the map again. Good fun!

My last bannerlord playthrough I stayed solo for several months, it was pretty fun.

Since we play similar games, I highly recommend modded battletech, the mods are very well done. It can be a little slow but when it's good, it's very good.

I'll for sure check it out. I played through the campaign unmodded some time back, but never did a sandbox career. Will definitely look into the roguetech mod when I do.

Also good are BTA (battletech advanced 3062 and I hear good things about Battletech Extended). Roguetech is as close to tabletop as they could do with the engine other mod packs are different mixes of vanilla and tabletop.

Just finished XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It fixed the gameplay issues I had with vanilla XCOM 2 + minor DLC, the voice actor selection was a fun surprise, and the additional story and gameplay elements were fantastic; my only complaint is that they should have tried to actually integrate the Alien Hunters DLC rather than just tossing its boss baddies into regular missions. My playthrough was longer than it should have been, but that was probably my fault for being too paranoid of the possibility of speedrunning myself into a corner. (In the first XCOM remake I made it to the final battle and then just couldn't beat it). It was also very clever of them to make the canon XCOM 1 ending "the player loses", not just because this made me feel better about being a loser, but because it gave them a good diagetic excuse for not going too wild with the story and gameplay changes.

(edit: strikethrough added for accuracy)

I'm playing XCOM Long War, except with the Rebalance mod. So far I've really enjoyed its changes.

This was a great game. It's a shame nothing in the genre has really matched XCOM imo.

I keep wondering when someone will make a new Jagged Alliance style game.

You have played and finished Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 "Wildfire"* right ? That's a .. solid improvement on the original JA 2. Much tougher, tons more guns, much better maps. (strategic layer is almost the same, but all the maps were made more interesting. some new mechanics).

*it's a combination of 1.13 with the 'Wildfire' mod maps. It was a bit of a pain to install back in the day, but it's probably still possible to get all the mods needed.

IMO, you'll have to make it yourself, I think. All the JA remakes were not good by shit tier studios.

Almost bought some of the 3d Russian ones, but upon closer review the magic was probably gone.

I've an idea for what I think would be a worthy successor. Have much of the game outline, mechanics / skeleton of a story for in my head.

It'd be use the assets of the isometric RPG game Underrail:Infusion. That's sequel to Underrail, which is an excellent isometric indie RPG. A fix for the cravings us old guys have for 1990s style games.

Not exactly Fallout - more combat oriented, of course it being indie, the graphics are unimpressive, but the game is just good.

So the idea is try to talk the dev into either letting someone make, or perhaps eventually making a tactical game like Jagged Alliance with assets that they're making for an isometric RPG set in the same 'universe'.

I feel like the two games wouldn't have be that much in competition with one another.

It's a very long shot, but I feel like writing up a proposal and lobbying it at him and seeing what he says is worth it.

There'd not be that much actual programming involved, as most of the logic would be the same in both games, so shouldn't be too difficult to develop. Merely make a shitton of maps, some interface changes, write all the dialogue and scripts. Just. Heh.

If I were remaking a game it'd be Star Legions, a sort of proto RTS where you play the explicit bad guy (a rip off of Klingons dialed up to 11). You're the invasion commander overseeing a series of Invasions of peaceful planets for glory and wealth.

I mean, if you're invading peaceful planets you are a bad guy. Doesn't have to be explicit or painted green.

There's really no point to planetary invasions whatsoever. Pure sadism, really.

It was also very clever of them to make the canon XCOM 1 ending "the player loses"

I actually really hated this and it's one of the reasons I prefer the first game. When I finished the first game I was really interested to see where they would take the story. But then they threw out the intriguing foundation they laid! It was very disappointing to me.

If you like the first game, have you tried the Long War? I've heard great things, and I like the fatigue system + longer campaign, but never gotten around to setting it up.

I've never done Long War but have also heard great things. I actually never finished an Enemy Within campaign either! I'm a real slacker, lol.

Hah it's ok. Enemy Within was pretty lackluster imo.

That's quite fair. But did you have to say it out loud? Now I'm going to have to edit my comment accordingly...

They did foreshadow a "terror from the deep 2" sequel pretty hard with the ending cut scene, didn't they? But maybe they realized an asset swap cash-in like the first TFTD wasn't an option, and had to get creative.

Nah I agree with @SubstantialFrivolity. The plot of the first was fascinating - the humans are able to fight the aliens without getting immediately wiped out because the Ethereals (aliens) have noticed a dire threat, and are seeking to Uplift a race genetically, mechanically, and psionically, because their own genetic potential has failed to meet the threat. They think humanity is the last chance to defeat this unknown threat, so they've been training us by fighting us and allowing us to slowly receive their technology.

Then for the plot of XCOM 2, the aliens won and took over Earth, so they basically rehash the same plot again. You are a human commander fighting the aliens. And when the story ends, what do you know! The aliens say the exact same thing, "you shouldn't destroy us we are preparing you for a greater threat!."

It's just lazy writing in my opinion. They failed to execute on the great base they set up. (Not sure why I felt the need to spoiler tag, but they're great games if you haven't played them.)

I haven't played many games in the last few years, but a friend of mine suggested Inscryption- a deck builder game. Card games are normally not my cup of tea, but the story is fantastic and meta and self-referential with SCP foundation vibes. I ended up completing the whole thing in about three days and then replayed the first section for another few days.

Ahh I have that but haven't played it. Might dust it off.

Disco Elysium is great. It was released at the same time as the Outer Worlds, and being a bit of an Obsidian fanboy, I was a bit miffed that the critics overwhelmingly preferred the Estonian upstart to the much-expected game made by the industry veterans. Five minutes into Disco Elysium I died to a lightbulb and became an instant convert. Now Obsidian has released Pentiment, an historical narrative driven/mystery type game, but it's not available in Russia, so I haven't played it yet.

...but the 'much expected game' made by industry veterans is not very good ? I've heard that the writing is meh, the quests ditto and so on. Basically my problem with Fallout 4; I felt homicidal urges towards the people who wrote the setting of the game.

That's what I remember from people being disappointed; I never bought it after seeing some let's play. Reminded me of why I was let down by Fallout 4.

Ahh I've played the Outer Worlds as well - fun game! The combat was disappointing though, it got incredibly easy about 1/3 of the way through for me even on the hardest difficulty. Hate when RPGs do that.

I'll have to look into Pentiment, although I'm more of a patient gamer myself, waiting a few years for sales before I pick up games. I'm excited for the Steam holiday sales this year.

Dwarf fortress got a graphical release which has been super fun. Being able to visualize the deep caverns carved out by hand is super enjoyable so far, even if some of the imagination is ripped out of the game with visual assets. So far it's really good, pretty stable, and runs well on my crappy laptop. I think it's missing some important key binds, but if you've never tried DF before you won't really notice. The QOL of being able to use a mouse makes other things a lot faster, especially for newer players. All in all, totally worth the 30 bucks.

I gave it a go yesterday. Super fun, much easier than the classic interface. Would recommend it to most themottians.

I want to sink a few hours into it, but I think I'll have to wait for some holidays or something when I can let myself submerge in the game for a few hours.

We could do this thing I read about where we'd have a save file we'd pass between various forum members.

That way, we could build a giant fortress without spending too much time individually on it.

Haven't bought it, but I feel like I should.

Is the interface less hostile now ?

As someone who puts hundreds of hours into building large rail networks in Transport Tycoon and its successors, I felt distinctly disappointed when making a simple mine railway with no lights, pathing or anything turned out to be impossible to figure out with the interface.

Yeah, on top of being able to use a mouse and actual graphics, all of the hotkeys are arranged more intelligently. Some are still weird, like the button presses from no menu to placing a bed is b -> f -> r, so build -> furniture -> r...? Something something legacy binds, but I'm fairly sure you can rebind a lot of it.

Also the graphical interface and tutorials are waaaay more intuitive now. Z-levels are no longer the strange abstract concept and are more visually digestible, and you can see all levels visible below the current z, so you can actually see the slope of the mountain your are carving. It's much easier to comprehend what you are putting together now, I would give it another shot if the ascii version was too impenetrable.

Significantly. Consider it the move from vim to WYSIWYG.

Mouse interface is universal. Niche placement/construction modes make sense now. Orders and buildings are grouped much more coherently. Labor seems to have been simplified, unless I'm missing a menu. There are inbuilt tutorials; only the first is interactive, but it covers the main UI layout.

This does come at the cost of some specificity. I understand a few hotkeys are changed or missing, but that's more a problem for power users or those with muscle memory.

I think you'll still be disappointed with the rail system, but then again, I haven't explored it much.

I'm not expecting something like in Factorio, just so I can move stone around quickly.

You think there's any chance the dev will use the money to transition DF into some nice voxel-based 3d engine ?

With lighting and all, it could be very cozy and interesting. Add in being able to possess a dwarf for some nice fighting, it could improve the game somewhat, and really wouldn't necessitate changing any of the internal logic, just another way of presenting what already exists. .

You think there's any chance the dev will use the money to transition DF into some nice voxel-based 3d engine ?

I...doubt it, I remember the announcement for DF getting a big graphical overhaul in tandem with a Steam release was specifically so that the dev could raise money to treat his cancer.

Did they ever get all those buggy frozen mechanics like the disabled "dwarven economy" working, or were they just dropped in favor of more content? (I hear there's sewers now?)

Ahh DF seems cool, but I usually can't play games like that any more due to carpal tunnel issues. Is it doable/worth it with a controller?

I've got the logitech k830, it's a slight arch but nothing crazy. I've seen those split keyboards, even tried a kinesis freestyle, but it didn't seem to work for me.

Might give it another go here in a bit. My issues are lot more generalized than just hands though.

Not having to use a mouse to click through endless menus always made it easier on my hands than some sim games, tbh.

No. Peasant tools are insufficient to play DF. 101 keys or bust.

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