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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2768 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

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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I got married a month ago, in a barebones courthouse elopement. Click through for some pictures of our adorable ring-bearer.

Congratulations! Your wife is very beautiful, and you don't scrub up too bad yourself! I hope you have many wonderful years together.

Congrats. Courthouse elopement is awesome. My wife and I did that as well. Instead of blowing ungodly amounts on a wedding, we saved it for the down payment on a house instead. Plus we're both introverts, so win/win there.

Congrats! You're a man with the same sensibilities I share.

My question had no ornation, deployed haphazardly while sitting on our couch, and Elle first asked if I was serious before her emphatic yes.

With the same flare for drama and romance, my proposal (such as it was) occurred in my car, on the way to dinner, with the observation that we really should just get married since we were going to be together forever anyway. The only place we differed is that we did go with 4 guests, just our parents. That line was easy enough to draw that we didn't think it would offend anyone too terribly.

I knew there was a reason I liked you. We did immediate family only, one surviving grandparent, siblings, parents, plus maid of honor/best man.

The only place we differed is that we did go with 4 guests, just our parents. That line was easy enough to draw that we didn't think it would offend anyone too terribly.

That's what my friend did with their elopement. That would've made sense if our parents were in town, but if they were going to fly in then naturally others would also want to be there and then...

Congratulations. With a predatory wedding industry and keeping-up-with-ashley mindset on social media, a courthouse elopement is the most cost-effective and sane way of getting married.

If you’re religious, the old Sunday morning ceremony followed by potluck in the parish hall is pretty cheap too.

Seriously. We saw photos of a wedding our friend went to that no joke cost $160k (flowers alone were $15k) bankrolled by the bride's rich family. Within the opulent displays of wealth genre, it seems weddings remain the least socially offensive.

Could weddings be a new avenue for laundering money?

How would that even work? The point of laundering money is to fabricate a plausible legal source for illegally-obtained cash, and I don't see how an extravagant wedding accomplishes that.

You can't? Seems obvious to me. Astronomical prices for goods or services that have little to no fixed value. Many wedding businesses are already random fly by night operations. You could set up front companies for catering, flowers, photos, pay with illicit cash, then take 90% on the back end as legitimate business income.

Whose money is being laundered and who is doing the laundering?

Same person for both. Imagine they bill you 15k for flowers, write it up as 30k on their books, you pay 15k however you pay, they pay another 15k in illegal cash. It all gets written up as coming from you, even though half of it is their own money illegally gained but now with a "legitimate" income source. So long as nobody compares notes.

Then again, everything I know about money laundering I learned from Breaking Bad and Ozark, so you know. Grain of salt and all that.

The "split-invoicing" you're describing would indeed be money laundering, but I don't see how wedding suppliers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this tactic. It would immediately raise red flags if a florist is depositing tens of thousands of dollars in cash since weddings are not known to be a cash-intensive industry. Generally you'd want a service business which has little to no variable costs (like flower inventory) to keep track of. That's why Breaking Bad used a car wash, and Ozark used a strip club. Both are perfect money-laundering operations.

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Congrats! that first photo is badass + tasteful.

Congratulations! I see someone is successfully mixing work and pleasure, at least in terms of locale ;)

Out of idle curiosity, any particular reason you didn't have friends or family over? Are you planning an "official" wedding later?

Oh, and I see the resemblance between your Substack profile picture and yourself, was that you intentionally choosing a similar picture or did you commission it/generate it with an AI?

Thanks! Both of us wanted to avoid the stress of combining the rote legal filing with the social ceremony, so eloping was our way of "getting it over with". We didn't do this correctly though, because rule #1 of eloping is to shut the fuck up, but we told people about it and naturally they wanted to attend. We thought about maybe opening it up to 4-6 people, but then other people heard about that and understandably got pissed. So we resorted back to zero guests. Our plan is indeed to have follow-up parties to make sure everyone is included, but at a much more leisurely pace.

The profile pic is a random portrait of Ibn Battuta the Maghrebi explorer. I didn't think we looked very similar, but it was close and fitting enough for a PFP.

The profile pic is a random portrait of Ibn Battuta the Maghrebi explorer. I didn't think we looked very similar, but it was close and fitting enough for a PFP.

I dimly recall his career as an explorer, and also the fact that there was a Bollywood song named after him, for god knows what reason haha.

So we resorted back to zero guests.

A bald faced lie, as expected of a lawyer (who is incidentally also bald), I can clear see one, don't tell me a royal feline doesn't count!

Haha what a bizarre topic to have a Bollywood song on, but hey at least he did visit India on his way to China

Congrats.

How many years of misery did you agree to endure? What I mean is, I have a very catholic great-uncle. For 50 years he and his wife hated each other. They had kids, lived in different parts of their house, and with everyone, they had just one subject of conversation: the assholishness of their better half. He forbade her to come to his funeral, so even death could not quell the depth of their feelings for each other. That may have been too many years of contractual pain. No-fault divorce, zero years, is too few. I think 5-10 years of commitment to misery could be the sweet spot.

This is a good question to ponder. We talked a lot about friends of ours who were in miserable marriages and how important it was to avoid a similar fate. So though we didn't agree on a specific set of years, we did agree that this will work only so long as it makes sense, and for us to avoid sweeping any issues under the rug. Who knows how effective such an oath will be but I figure it's better than nothing, and serves at least to reminds ourselves of each other's expectations.

Congratulations! Your ring-bearer looks very confused by the situation, though very adorable.

Paging @ymeskhout

4chan has cottoned on to your schemes.

The link has expired. What was it?

Yup, very common problem. As much as it compromises my independence in the eyes of some of my clients, this is one big reason I like getting paid by the state for my work. There's something that feels so distasteful about taking money from someone asking for help with their very shitty situation.

Oh congratulations to the newlyweds by the way

A Wooden 486

The madness overtook me and I built another retro computer. The last computer I'm really nostalgic for is my family's first computer, a 486 DX2 with a "screaming fast" VLB VGA card. My dad was really proud of that specific fact. I notice a guy on ebay selling NOS 486 boards for a while, so I after lowballing several, I eventually got lucky and won a bid. Turns out it was a rebranded and oft maligned PC Chips board, but it works for me. For now. Even has real cache chips. Because PC Chips got into a habit of using fakes.

Getting it to post for the first time was exciting. Vesa Localbus cards almost give modern graphics cards a run for their money in length. I didn't even have to change any jumpers, it was default set up for a DX or DX2 with a 33 Mhz FSB. So it picked up the AMD DX2 I put in right away. I did have to clip off the crappy battery and replace it with some AA's. Putting aside the risk of leakage, the old battery also seemed to be thoroughly dead. I actually found conflicting information about the voltage I should use for a battery replacement, as documentation about this specific motherboard was sparse and contradictory. One guide said 6V, another 3.6V. I ended up replacing those AAA's with a coin cell battery at a lower voltage and it works fine. When the VLB multi io card finally showed up, I went with a compact flash adapter and a Gotek floppy emulator. And then for the soundcard I just used a humble ESS Audiodrive card, model ES 1868. Which actually had an extra IDE connector on it, which I used for the CD-ROM. This was very fortunate for reasons that come later.

Now, what really makes this build special, is the case I had in mind for it. I don't have any AT style cases. And cramming the last AT style motherboard I got into an ATX case was a royal pain in my ass. But I've had it stuck in my brain for going on 2 years now to make a retro PC case in the style of an old TV. Stuff like this, or this, or this. I think I mostly cribbed design elements from the second example. I sketched out my plans, and checked what lumber I had available, and got to work.

Well, the first thing I did was dremel out a drive cage from a sacrificial cheapo case. Then I made the bezel for the LCD monitor I was going to embed in it. After that came some experimentation. I had wanted to fashion a metal faceplate out of the side of the sacrificial case. But I am not a metal worker, and it turned out like shit IMHO. My next plan was to take a piece of walnut I had lying around, very carefully route out some speaker grills, and then I attempted to use my oscillating multitool to plunge cut the drive bays out. That didn't work. So instead I got my jigsaw out to remove the bulk, and attempting to chisel it neat. It went ok I guess. Better than the metal.

I splurged on a drill press to make the front panel. Only two buttons, power and turbo, and three LEDs for power, turbo and HDD activity. I actually used some old forstner bits my FIL gave me to take out 1/4" from the back, and then a bit that cut a 1" wide plug through the rest of the wood. This left me with buttons I could use that kept a continuous grain pattern. After that I milled the boards for the sides, top and bottom. Skip ahead a good deal, after cutting, profiling, sanding, staining, shellac and wax, I went with pocket screws to get it all together. No back yet though. Another new thing I did was use some EZ Lock threaded inserts. Those are what the bolts thread into which hold the monitor in place. I'll be using them again later for the motherboard standoffs.

The back was a panel I glued up, then cross cut into two parts. I routed out a box for the PSU to fit into, and then tried to jigsaw and chisel out the opening for it. It went worse than the drive bays, but at least it's the back of the case. The notch is for cables to pass through, and that went much smoother with the drill press and forstner bit, plus the jigsaw to clean it up. Sand, stain, blah blah blah, and the first part of the back is pocket screwed in. It's a tight fit. I could have removed the monitor to fit the drive bay and PSU back in, but I just barely had clearance otherwise. The last part hinges out, and has more threaded inserts for the motherboard. I also dremeled out the expansion card slots from the sacrificial case and screwed it to the plank. As you can see, it's a tight fit, and many of the cables only barely reach. I had to make patch cables for the front IO, or my own cables from scratch. I still need to make a cable with an LED for the HDD light. This is also where having two IDE ports came in handy, as there was no way to stretch one cable from the drive bays back to where the compact flash is mounted.

And the final product! I installed DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 as was custom at the time. Super proud of how this one turned out. I just have no fucking clue what to do with it.

Hindsight is 20/20 and "easier said than done" notwithstanding... At the risk of being a back seat woodworker I'd redo the front panel and make it cleaner and simpler by replacing it with a cover flap, maybe with just the volume knob exposed. Faster and more practical would be to make a new flap on top of the existing control panel and avoid having to alter too much of the finished work. Just seems a shame after making such a good job of the power/turbo buttons.

You know, my original design had a flap. But the more I thought about it, the more I just didn't like it.

I had also considered attempting to redo the front panel without the minor flaws, but the first one was incredibly time consuming, and frankly it's not like my skills have magically gotten better. It'd likely turn out the same or worse. I don't have a solid understanding of what choices I could have made different. I think it's just going to take practice with the jigsaw, and also learning how to keep my chisels sharper. Possibly after my skills have grown (or I cave and get a CNC machine) I'll give remaking that panel another go.

Update on singing Christmas carols with kids.

First, thanks for all the recommendations! There were some I had never heard before and that I plan to sing.

I ended up printing off some songs from A Collection of Christmas Carols, a site that has PDF of a few hundred Christmas songs along with free midis and even a GitHub repo so you can create something of your own with the material. Really cool resource!

So far, we've learned The Twelve Days of Christmas, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Gaudete, and We Three Kings. Today we started on the Sussex Carol, which is a little trickier for kids.

The kids are enjoying all of them a lot. Twelve Days of Christmas is fun because each one gets their own item in the list for a solo (baby gets to say "partridge in a pear tree!"). They love shouting the chorus of Gaudete and We Three Kings. And my daughter has started trying to harmonize on our own during We Three Kings, which is extra exciting because part of the reason I wanted to do this was to trick them into learning to enjoy singing!

Overall, great experience so far. 10/10, would recommend if you've got small kids.

I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 Resident Evil: Village. It's the first time that I've played anything labelled "survival horror", and I'm trying to calibrate my expectations.

I'm getting flashbacks to playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. (Yes, I'm old.) The designers really like to take over your controls so they can show you an "exciting" cinematic, then hand the controls back suddenly to you. (The one indicator is a "[S]kip" prompt at the bottom right corner of your screen.)

Is this an RE:V thing? A Capcom thing? A survival horror thing?

The only fun survival horror game I've played was Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money. It was pretty light on the horror, which was good. I've always wondered whether there was anything else out there like that. Atmospheric, suspenseful, tense, but not going to give me nightmares.

Anyone got recommendations?

Subnautica?

Prey (2016) was really good. Perhaps heavier on the horror, but I’m not usually a fan of the genre, and I enjoyed it.

They're more adventure-ish than survival horror, but possibly the Echo Night series, depending on your definition of horror; the games involve ghosts, and some are antagonistic, but they're a far cry from Fatal Frame/Project Zero type spooky ghosts. Often, the goal is to free the ghosts, which may lessen the horror aspect and can be wholesome. But they can be hard games to recommend, due to possible frustration with saving/dying, some puzzles, and King's Field controls for the first two games. Emulation helps a lot.

I'm loving the old school graphics. I'll check these out.

It's a resident evil thing, starting with 4. They were pretty common in action adventure games of that era like God of War and Uncharted. Devs had the ability to develop great Hollywood -style set pieces, but it was hard to make them interactive for the player, hence the QTE.

RE5 has some hilarious ones. I'll never forget having to punch that boulder!

They were big in the early 2000s, I think the PS2 God of War games popularized them.

Resident Evil 4 was famous for overusing them: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o1_3SdXcdMU

RE6 had a menu option to automatically pass all QTEs for people who hate them.

That set of annoyances are typically called Quicktime Events, and while they're more common in survival horror, they're (thankfully) not universal there, nor are they specific to it (the FFXIV MMORPG calls them Active Time Maneuvers, for example). While they can be done moderately well, they're famously unpopular, and my impression's that the Resident Evil series tends to be on the jankier side even for survival horror (Silent Hill, by contrast, only uses them as a way to reduce damage when you've already been hit by an attack, or as part of the killing blow for a boss).

Although the origin of QTE are often attributed to interactive movie laserdisc video games that showed video clips stored on a laserdisc like Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, June 1983), Cliff Hanger (Stern, December 1983) and Road Blaster (Data East, 1985), these left little room for more advanced gameplay elements.

Ha! Thanks.

I've been playing cyberpunk 2077. Fun game, has been sucking up my time. Only downside is that I went in with a particular playstyle that I enjoy from shooters, and its sometimes been hard to get the cyberpunk leveling to play well with my preferred playstyle. I ended up having a "cool" based character that absolutely murders with a silenced pistol. Cyberneticed like crazy, and hacks my way through things.

I'm also going to go see Bert Kreischer's standup tour soon. Very excited for that.

Only downside is that I went in with a particular playstyle that I enjoy from shooters, and its sometimes been hard to get the cyberpunk leveling to play well with my preferred playstyle.

How well does it handle stealth? I have been a first-person sneaker fiend since Thief.

I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.

I recently finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution as...a stealthy hacker.

Isn't that the one where the boss fights can be quite difficult for certain (non-combat) role choices?

Maybe?

I recall playing the original Deus Ex with a stealth assassin. The game took care to provide killphrases for two of the minibosses. And then—whoops!—I had a devil of a time trying to deal with Walton Simons(?) at Area 51 armed just with a sniper rifle. Apparently if I had just spent a moment to knock him unconscious in the previous mission he never would have appeared...

I think the key frustrations for DE:HR boss fights boil down to a couple of things.

  1. You have to carry along weaponry on mission after mission so it'll be available during the four boss fights. For most of the game, that meant a fully tricked-out revolver, based on wiki advice. Then I added a grenade launcher. They take up room, especially when added to a tranq rifle and a stun gun.
  2. You'll find the usual game designer trope where your weapons don't really do much until you've dealt with some precondition.
  3. Pretty much every time I save spammed and retried and then looked on the wiki for hints and then won, I explored the area after the fight. Lots of weapon/ammo caches, and other rooms and corridors besides the main "arena". So maybe they did design them to support hiding and sniping. (Your non-lethals won't work.) But when the cut scene ends and the mini-boss is in front of you, there's a very strong tendency to just start unloading.

There's a DLC The Missing Link where the final boss is just a guy, and sneaking over and doing a takedown works just fine. That was nice.

There are still (at least?) two ways to get past Simons in Area 51 without killing him. That game did not want want to be accused of railroading you.

Apparently they patched the boss fights so they're beatable even when you didn't spec into "apply gun to enemy in open combat".

Here we are. Director's Cut only.

Reworked Bosses

Now remember that the reworked bosses is incredibly important for this DLC and the main selling point for many fans. The reason the Deus Ex Human Revolution bosses were unfaithful to the original source was that the game itself was outsourced to another company to create the boss battles so it didn't really follow as close to the other work done on the game as it should have. Leading to the bosses being more like a generic FPS instead of having multiple viable options based on how you developed your character.

They did not add ways to avoid bosses completely however they have given you various options on how to deal with them depending on how you progressed with your character.

Hacking is now a viable way to deal with bosses

Boss 1 Example: [...]

Boss 2 Example: [...]

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/137386/whats-different-in-deus-ex-human-revolution-directors-cut

I elided the spoilery bits.

The stealth is quite good. Many of the gigs and other side jobs have thieving or installing a virus on the network as a goal. You get a bonus for remaining undetected. You can get cybermods to be more stealthy and can hack cameras / turrets / etc.

Have you played phantom liberty yet? Being a stealth hacker in PL is op as fuck, legendary quickhacks are ridiculous. My set up goes invisible and slow mo if anyone sees me and contagion plus iirc cyberware malfunction drops entire rooms of enemies, with every death cutting any potential trace progress by a third. It's a lot of fun, but it does feel cheap.

I haven't, I just got around to playing Cyberpunk in the last few weeks. I really liked it and I'm planning to get PL.

With the Sonic Shock (?) hack, you never even get traced at all, it’s very OP and costs almost nothing to put at the start of your queue.

Stealth feels like a major part of the game. Some main story line missions require stealth. Many side missions have rewards for stealthy completions. And nearly every side mission can be completed in a stealthy way, if you have the right build.

The stealth system of the game goes deep. Pretty much every character build type gets some stealth bonus options. Even unintuitive ones like "body" (strength) have stealth benefits, a high body stat gives you more entry options into a building, so you could take slightly easier routes.

There is also a whole hacking system in the game that has covert options. Its necessary to use it to take out cameras, but it can also be used to create distractions, or blow up environmental hazards. Certain hacking things are "traceable", but the tracing takes some time, you'll just be on a time limit until you can finish off the enemies. There are also a variety of hacks against people, you can erase their memory to make a quick move behind them and take them out. You can disable their optics to make a dash to a new set of cover. You can disable their hearing and audio to make a takedown of the guy next to them unheard. Or you can just ping an electronic item or person to get a whole layout of the all the people, cameras, and gadgets in the vicinity.

Takedowns can be lethal or non-lethal.

Bodies need to be hidden, if another enemy finds a body they'll alert the whole place.

I usually don't go out of my way to play stealth games, but I often enjoy the mechanics. I'd say cyberpunk is comparable to dishonored in terms of fun stealth mechanics, and certainly better than the assassin creed games.

An example stealth run:

I'm given a mission to plant a virus on a club owner's computer.

I can walk into the main area of the club without getting in trouble as long as my guns aren't drawn. I do this and tag as many cameras and goons as I can. Each time I find a camera I shut it down. I leave the club and circle around the outside for easier entrances. I'm blocked out of one door because it requires body to enter. Another door requires technical ability. I open it up and peak in to see a camera in the room. I quickly disable it.

Then I jump into the camera system through that camera. I cycle through all the cameras, making sure I've tagged every goon I can find. If any cameras are within sight of each other I turn them off.

A security room is on the first floor near the entrance I found. My objective is on the second floor. I make my way to the security room, there is a goon inside, but his back is to the door. I sneak and do a stealth takedown of the goon. I have access to the computer terminal with all the security cameras. I make sure all the security cameras are shut down.

If there is a loose goon walking around that isn't covered by other goon's field of vision I'll try and do a stealth take down and stash the body either in the security room or outside the club.

I'll make my way upstairs. Sometimes there is a separate security system for the second floor, so I need to be checking the walls for additional security cameras.

The final room with my objective has two goons in it. They are talking with each other. One camera in the room that I already shutdown from the lower floor security room. I hack the camera to distract the two goons. They turn towards the camera, one is in front of the other one. The one in front I audio hack while I shoot the one in the back in the head. Then I move in and do a stealth takedown.

At this point if I have an objective for a stealth exit I'll run outside the club to get the stealth award. And then I'll turn back around, go back into the club and start a gun fight with the goons. Gunning them all down and stealing their valuable gear. I'll try to start the gunning down stealthily with a silenced pistol, but I rarely kill more than a few goons before they all hear me and it turns into a real gun fight.

IMHO this makes it sound slightly more exciting than it is, but it’s still pretty fun. That said, I still think Deus Ex Mankind Divided has better cyberpunk stealth, especially in some of the standout levels (the bank in Prague, Golem).

I forgot I played Deus Ex, but I remember often being frustrated with stealth gameplay in Deus ex, because it often had choke points that forced you to either have a super stealth build or enter combat. So I guess I like the level and map design in cyberpunk 2077 better

I actually very much like Cyberpunk’s gameplay now. I still have mixed views on the story, it’s extremely linear, doesn’t work very well for a game because of the implied time pressure, key relationships are rushed and it’s not a great cyberpunk story (the anime’s story would have been much better for the game). It does have some high points and I think the acting is mostly great, and the plot isn’t bad enough to be distracting (unlike Baldur’s Gate 3), but I was hoping for better after Hearts of Stone.

Yeah the implied time pressure annoyed me, once I realized it was only implied I completely dropped the main story campaign and have been having fun doing side missions.

It is a weird thing in open world games. There has to be a main quest line. But it is so common for me to enjoy side storylines way more. I've played many open world games where I basically treat the main storyline as one of the last interesting side quests I can find. I was playing hogwarts legacy a few weeks ago, and it was the same. The main storyline was good, but I still had more fun just putzing around and exploring stuff. The Bethesda games are notorious for boring main storylines.

I think it’s completely ridiculous that the game tells you you’re about to die in WEEKS and then you’re expected to square that with spending your time farming NCPD scanner missions to buy a nice car or rent a better apartment, like why would V care? It’s awful for roleplaying, I contrived some explanation that my V basically didn’t believe she was going to die, and so spends a couple months just working as a merc until she notices some more symptoms and THEN goes to meet Takamura, but it still felt very dumb.

Red Dead 2 also has urgency issues (in the last three chapters in the game especially), it harms the plot despite it being an all time favorite. I think the best thing is for open world RPGs to have optional main storylines that the player can choose to pursue, but which mostly lack urgency outside of key moments, and have downtime otherwise.

Batman: Arkham City is identical to RDR2 in this regard after Batman is poisoned. The only side mission which organically makes sense for Batman to prioritize is the Mad Hatter one, because it's predicated on Hatter tricking Bruce with a fake cure. But then it doesn't make sense if you wait till after the main storyline is done to complete the mission, because Bruce is already cured.

What do you find it rewarding to play/watch/do on evenings where your head is a bit fried and tired and anything requiring quick reactions or any real mental effort would feel demanding? :)

Right screen: Sam sulek vids

Left screen: Stardew Valley

I've been enjoying the "Murderbot Diaries" audio books, but I finished them all.

I also enjoy Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires, but I use cheat engine to give myself a huge amount of money and just set about purging chaos.

Videos where people make things. There is a fun channel where a guy makes really sharp knives out of random materials. There are lots of wood spinning channels. They put a big lump of wood on a spinner and just carve away. Sometimes they'll add resin or other stuff to fill in gaps. Mark Rober makes interesting and silly gadgets.

Videos where people shoot or blow up thing, usually in slow motion. Explosions are cool yo. Kentucky ballistics.

There are lots of wood spinning channels. They put a big lump of wood on a spinner and just carve away. Sometimes they'll add resin or other stuff to fill in gaps.

Using a lathe on wood is typically called wood turning, not wood spinning, but I agree that they're great videos to wind down the evening without much stress or effort.

I'll throw out restoration videos, too. I love seeing an old rusty butcher cleaver turned into a chrome polished show piece, or to watch some old piece of machinery restored, complete with newly machined parts where necessary.

Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur videos.

Especially if I'm high. His speech impediment takes on an almost hypnotic quality.

For video games, Civ5 or Slay the Spire. You can play a just a few turns or kill an hour until your head is back on straight.

Infotainment YouTube: Tasting History, Abroad in Japan, James Hoffman, The Modern Rogue, and How to Drink are my go-tos.

Those are also great times to do small mindless chores, like wipe down the kitchen sink/counters, sweep the floor. With the temperatures dropping, this week I put plastic film on the windows after work.

I'm not sure what your literary tastes run to but I usually keep a couple "popcorn" books on hand; books that'll occupy your brain just enough for a light mental meal. The Reacher series, memoirs of a d-list celebrity, or some pseudo-history (for sheer entertainment spectacle).

ETA: Videos of cows getting their hooves trimmed is oddly peaceful. Something about returning things to a clean pristine state, I guess.

Plastic film? Does that help?

On older single-paned windows or drafty windows (caused by bad installation or aging-related warping), yes. Not going to do that much for modern, double-paned windows with good seals on the gaskets.

In the long-run, it's better to just replace old windows but if you are renting or don't plan to stay more than three or four years, plastic film works fine as an inexpensive get-by solution.

I think I might have to re-seal them too? But I'll try the film, thanks.

Yeah, first thing you should check is caulking around the frame.

If your windows are old and drafty it does for sure -- if they aren't it might create some dead airspace I suppose, which is R-... more than just a window?

My windows are pretty old and definitely drafty. :( I'll look into this.

Slay the Spire, truly! That one is always fun. So much fun I actually 100%ed the achievements and pushed the Ironclad until I won Ascension 20. I'm not normally a completionist, but StS just never stopped being fun.

I just picked it up a few months ago on a whim and have been casually playing the wind down in the evenings.

I've been watching Baalorlord's channel, as he usually posts winning runs a couple times a week, and was doing his mastery challenge this year. I also managed to win on A20 with Watcher and Silent this year, after being limited to Defect and Ironclad for years prior.

Play PC games with buddies. They're fairly slow gamers, so it's primarily a social activity with some mild gaming on the side. Lately we've been playing Darktide.

Other than that, I like to just go to bed early, with a big cup of tea and a book, and then I usually just fall asleep. Which works out just as well. Maybe I'll do exactly that today, get up early tomorrow, and go for a swim before wife and child wake up and notice that I'm gone.

Some video games are very low effort. For instance, I have been playing Mother 3, and JRPGs in general do not require quick reactions.

Otherwise, a low-stakes TV show, or maybe put on some music and get a beer and just enjoy it for a bit.

Lately I've been reading Conan. Nearly finished actually, only have 50 pages left of Hour of the Dragon and then A Witch Shall be Born. Sometimes whiskey helps get my mind to stop being so dopamine fucked and slow the fuck down and focus on words on a page.

When the weather is nicer. I sit on the porch with a cigar and my ipad, and watch terrible anime like Baki or Bastard! Just the dumbest, most testosterone power fantasy shit I can find. Fucking love it. Iron Blooded Orphans wasn't bad either.

Been reading some Howard lately -- there's plenty more in the same vein when you run out of Conan -- but Howard's other axe-in-your-face protagonists just aren't the same. The introspective Kull, the melancholy Bran mak Morn, the borderline-unhinged Solomon Kane, the various bitter and vengeful Gaels from Black Turlogh to Donald MacDeesa, they all lack Conan's occasional gigachad jollity. They're all drawn from the same head-breaking tiger-man archetype, but the others just aren't having fun with it.

Have you watched Tartakovsky's Primal? The main characters' names are taken from the title of a Howard story, and it's turned up to 11 to the point that our hero doesn't interrupt his primitive ass-kicking with a single spoken word until the end of the first season.

You know, I plan to come back around to Solomon Kane at some point, but I want to get through Blaine Lee Pardoe's Land & Sea some. And I also got Vermis II in the mail recently, and am dying to dig into it. Vermis I was fucking amazing and lit my imagination on fire.

I read all the Conans a few years ago. Surprisingly good. The only real downside, to me, were Conan's absolutely inevitable victories, but otherwise it was quite enjoyable.

Any fans of Warhammer 3 or Victoria 3 here? I’m not a serious gamer at all, picked them up on a Steam sale and just find them confusing. Only game I’ve played seriously is the last three Civilization entries and even then I only have 600 hrs on Civ 6 since 2016.

Have you got prior experience with Total War games? Warhammer 3 isn't the easiest game for a noob to the genre, especially given the far less simple archetypes for units, let alone magic.

I'm a big fan of the series, the very concept of merging Warhammer Fantasy and Total War is one of those chef's kiss things that tells me that we're capable of occasionally picking up the low hanging fruit out there. There's nothing like desperately maneuvering your handful of normal human units and using all the fire power they possess to hold off a horde of Chaos forces that can rip them apart limb from limb.

If you only have W3, I suggest Cathay as a starting faction. The concept of their units is simple and recognizable, and it'll teach you to use infantry to screen, how to position ranged units, the application of cav and so on.

I'd also highly recommend the SFO mod, can't play without it, it makes the battles and campaign so much more fun.

I am a HUGE fan of Total Warhammer in general. Love it. TW3 is fine, but the factions it comes with are a bit advanced. Definitely worth picking gup TW1 to get the "core" factions (Empire, Dwarves, Greenskins, and Vampires [which aren't really "core" but are fun]).

What in particular are you finding confusing? The way the Total Warhammer games "stack" together, TW3 is more like a really big expansion pack then a standalone game mechanics wise, so there is a lot to be confused about if you're just jumping in.

Some general advice:

-ABC: Always Be Conquering. The way the economy works massively rewards conquest and looting, and if you aren't constantly expanding you'll struggle. Even just winning a battle will reward you with gold, so the more you're fighting the more you're earning.

-A huge part of strategy is where you place your armies. The maps are huge (absolutely IMMENSE in the case of the Immoral Empires campaign) and it takes time for your armies to move across them. Enemy armies will show up where you didn't expect, so make sure you have armies positioned so that they can intercept an invading force within 2-3 turns.

-Look at the tooltip descriptions for each unit, they can be very handy. Some of them take some jargon learning to get, but you can hover over most things and an explanation will appear. One useful thing to know is that "Shock Cavalry" is great when charging into the enemy, and for about 20 seconds after the charge, but will not hold up in long term melee combat and will need to retreat and charge again. "Melee Cavalry" on the other hand has the stats needed to do well in prolonged melee combat.

-"Anti-large" units are a must, you need at least a couple of them in each army because even crummy anti-large units do great against monsters and cavalry.

-If a settlement you've conquered isn't in a great environment for your faction, or is in a position where it will be too costly to keep defended, then it's generally better to loot it, and then on the next turn raze it. If somebody settles on it the initial defenses will be very weak, so it's easy to roll back in and burn it back down.

There's way too much more to advise on, but I'd be happy to help with specific questions and confusions.

I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.

I bought it because I was somehow led to believe that the Imperium of Man would make a good stand-in for the Total War: Thirty Years' War that I always wanted but never got. Well, to nobody's surprise, not even my own, I was sorely disappointed. I came from Total War: Shogun 2, itself a limited-but-agreeable entry in the series, and what I find with TW:WH3 is a giant mess of a game that I thoroughly hate. I have written a very long, very negative review on steam and I would have many negative things to say about the game if anyone cared to hear them.

I'd be interested to hear your criticisms. Personally it's one of the top 10 games I've ever played, and my only real criticisms are: (1) it has a sort of black box complexity that creates a high barrier to entry for new players, and (2) it's a bit buggier than I'd like.

See https://www.themotte.org/post/776/friday-fun-thread-for-december-1/165271?context=8#context .

I'd like to hear it! Negative criticism is fun to read.

One copy-pasted very negative and entirely subjective, making-no-attempt-at-fairness steam review that may or may not be mine coming up.

tl;dr: Heavily overrated, actually a mess.

Aesthetically it's ugly, garish, tasteless. Fans of the setting will be unable to notice this, but all that I see is random colors and nonsensical designs. The setting is shit and it's mildly depressing that CA/Sega made three installments for it instead of giving the Thirty Years' War a shot. But people like it and buy it and review it positively. People who hate history. People who watch superhero movies. People who are many, but have no taste.

As for the setting itself, what's even to be said? It's trash. Trashy trash. Worthless. Unsalvageable. Do you need an explanation why? Then stop reading, reading is not for you.

Mechanically, to be charitable, it's functional. It's also by far the least enjoyable Total War title I've played, and I've played most of them. The TW formula hasn't evolved at all, you're still playing the same basic game as back when, but now it has a bunch of Warhammer-related additional systems slathered on top that don't really add to what the game is actually about. The actual tactical battles are perfunctory, messy and poorly manageable, with none of the elegance and legibility the series had at its peak. The UI has degenerated as well and looks worse than ever. UX is unpleasant.

Strategy layer:

  • Armies now cannot exist without a leader, so no good leader with his full stack of twenty units followed by additional leaderless reinforcements - you will always have multiples of twenty units fighting multiples of twenty units.
  • Logistics, usually largely neglected in TW games, have been completely deleted. You can now just summon new units all over the map. Sure it costs some additional money to hire them, but that's a small price to pay for keeping your force behind enemy lines supplied with top-tier troops.
  • Attrition seems like a major issue, until you realize that you can completely negate it by just going a little slower, or by going a little faster and skipping past dangerous terrain.
  • Autoresolve is far too reliable. You're even told in advance which units of yours will be destroyed. Yes, this is how war works: Perfect information and predictability. Sun Tzu had no idea. You're almost always better off autoresolving a fight, which distributes damage almost evenly across your units, then recovering your losses within a turn or two, than to play a battle manually and risk losing entire units that you would then have to replace with raw recruits. What's more, the autoresolve formula doesn't seem to take unit composition into account at all, so battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor.
  • Winning a fight usually drowns you in pop-ups and TODOs. You found half a dozen magic items, your commanders gained five perks each from having fought a battle and having been the attackers and from the specific enemies they fought and from having been personally in combat, also your heroes would like you to distribute the skill points they just gained, oh and don't forget to check your inventory to see whether you can do some crafting with the items you found.
  • Quests. Yeah, this is what every strategy game needs: Quests. Quests so misplaced and irrelevant to the game at large that you can just let the relevant army teleport to the quest location. This alone should tell you how stupid an idea having quests in this game is.
  • Forget about large-scale geographic concerns in strategy, because random events will just teleport multiple enemy armies right into what you assumed to be the pacified heartland of your empire.
  • You can no longer raid trade routes. Yeah, that was far too intuitive, interesting and realistic. Instead of the practical limit on trade being your ability to protect it, which neatly interfaced with all other systems in the game, there is now simply a diplomatic penalty to new trade agreements based on how many you already have.

Tactical layer:

  • Do you remember when TW was about infantry, cavalry, and ranged troops, and a general being nearby to provide moral support? That was nice. You could apply a little real-world logic and make like Napoleon, outflanking, picking good terrain, maybe even threaten the enemy general, have little fights for valuable locations like hills or escarpments.
  • Now it's about Infantry, Cavalry, Ranged Troops, Flyers, Giants, Spellcasters, what items you have equipped and what active abilities you've levelled up and which of a million passive bonuses you have picked up during the campaign.
  • Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible. What, you don't like MOBAs? Get with the times, gramps.
  • Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.
  • Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.
  • If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.
  • Maps are tiny funnels on which you don't get to position and manoeuver, you just have the two forces crash into each other right from the start.
  • The option to automate some troops on demand, present in older TW titles, is still not back. Given that this game is micromanagement hell, I miss it sorely.

Eh. It's not worth going into the details of it. The Total War series has gone to shit.

I regret giving them money for this. Everyone who recommended this as "well if you want to play a strategy/tactics game set in renaissance Germany, just play this!" was wrong to do so and should feel bad about it.

...And now I want a game that is all about army logistics.

On the shallow but higher-production end, Hearts of Iron.

On the extremely crunchy and lower-tech end, Shadow Empire.

Hearts of Iron

Are you referring to Darkest Hour, 3, or 4?

Personally, I play 4. I would not be surprised if an older one delves way deeper into one or another logistical element.

The reason I feel it's worth mentioning, despite the many, many non-logistical elements to the game? Aircraft carriers. I'd been playing Endless Space 2 and especially Stellaris while complaining about the portrayal of carriers. Far too often, strike craft are treated as a glorified missile. The point of a real-world carrier isn't to shoot missiles at enemy capital ships. It's to project force via strikes, recon, and air superiority. I wanted my Stellaris carriers to be spaceborne bases, dominating their entire star system without ever having to show up on enemy scopes.

I'd also been playing Ashes of the Singularity and its far superior predecessor, Supreme Commander. At least those games tried to give aircraft radically different movement and constraints than land units! But they were still just big blobs of hit points, because they had to play nice with the existing RTS paradigm of bubble-shielded turrets and fog of war. They couldn't implement realistic force projection without breaking the assumptions that kept all the rest of the game functional.

So I started brainstorming a true logistics RTS. It needed supply depots and convoys, because aircraft benefit from a distributed attack surface rather than a single all-or-nothing megabase. It needed more robust intelligence gathering to allow decisive tactical advantages without disregarding all pretense of counterplay. It needed to model equipment and supplies and the effects of their absence on an army. In short, I wanted to focus on ways to pressure the enemy beyond the traditional method of "make all his hit points go away."

Then I tried HoI4. Supply centers and railways, check. Production and stockpiling of materiel, check. Aircraft that are actually modeled as flying missions rather than continuous close air support, CHECK. A naval game of cat and mouse that I didn't know I wanted. The game is janky as hell, and it doesn't always live up to the mechanics I'd like. But it's trying for something so different from a traditional RTS that I can't help but love it.

Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2 may qualify. This page describes the game's logistics system.

Thanks, that's quite interesting. I was more interested in pre-railroad warfare, though, back when they had armies and not fronts.

My God, that is a terrible review, especially since so many of the sins you ascribe to TWW began well before in the historical genre, like Rome 2 making generals mandatory for moving troops, or trade routes being abstracted away.

Fuck your artillery because flying units will just bypass any defensive lines you have.

Flying units like bats are meant to counter artillery for factions that lack it themselves. You handle it by focusing ranged units on them as they approach, or keeping cav ready in the backlines to sweep them away as soon as they land, or even dismounting the crews and running them away.

Spellcasters have no counterplay at all. Yeah they only get a few shots per fight, and it's more spectacle than effect. But given that and that you can't automate your own spellcasters, the entire existence of spellcasting is just a major annoyance on both ends and it doesn't meaningfully interact with anything else in the game at all. It's slapped-on and stupid and adds nothing of value to the game.

Aneurysm. You can:

  1. Shoot them with artillery
  2. Sic your own melee lords or heroes on them
  3. Counterspell them with magic missiles

Doesn't meaningfully interact?? If you can't see the utility of buffing up your own units, healing monsters and cav, turning your lord into a roided monster, or nuking the enemy..

If terrain matters at all I haven't seen it do so.

It very much does, because if you're not considering sightlines or elevation, then your gunpowder armies are useless.

Not to mention that there are serious elevation buffs, units that have a height differential above their enemies get a massive damage buff to their ranged or even melee attacks, and a damage reduction in turn.

My God, that is a terrible review, especially since so many of the sins you ascribe to TWW began well before in the historical genre, like Rome 2 making generals mandatory for moving troops, or trade routes being abstracted away.

Yes. I said that it was a very subjective review, and written from a perspective of one who last played Shogun 2, didn't I?

Flying units like bats are meant to counter artillery for factions that lack it themselves. You handle it by focusing ranged units on them as they approach, or keeping cav ready in the backlines to sweep them away as soon as they land, or even dismounting the crews and running them away.

Fair, I guess that's possible.

Aneurysm. You can [...] Doesn't meaningfully interact?? If you can't see the utility of buffing up your own units, healing monsters and cav, turning your lord into a roided monster, or nuking the enemy..

I stand by that. Yeah, magic sucks. It doesn't fit into the gameplay at all. It's completely bolted-on. Sure you can get gameplay advantages out of it, but there are no tactical interactions with it for both sides. The mage just snaps his fingers and a buff happens somewhere on the field, or damage is dealt. It's not like generals who need to balance risk and reward to inspire wavering troops, or artillery that needs to be carefully positioned and protected. It's one very tough unit that gets to apply buffs or AOE damage at extreme distances without needing to take any risks or requiring precise positioning. IMO you can tell how poorly it interfaces with the game at large by how strictly limited magic use is in applications per battle.

It very much does, because if you're not considering sightlines or elevation, then your gunpowder armies are useless. Not to mention that there are serious elevation buffs, units that have a height differential above their enemies get a massive damage buff to their ranged or even melee attacks, and a damage reduction in turn.

I admit, it was hyperbole. Yes terrain matters - but much less so than in earlier TW games, is my impression.

Since you're a fan of Shogun 2, would you agree that naval artillery bombardment, which I believe was in FOTS, has the same "drawbacks" as magic?

It's click a button and magic rocks fall, everyone dies.

It's still not true for magic in TWW3, because:

  1. Most spellcasters are squishy, they can easily get themselves killed by enemy single entity lords, heroes or monsters. Or if you miscast too many times.

  2. Magic offers a great deal of contextual utility. Let's say you're on the offensive against an enemy that doesn't want to budge. Send a mage up, dodging fire, and then launch a bombardment. That gets the AI to move and approach your own favorable position. Or during a siege, helping blast the defenders on walls before you attack. Or using a summoned disposable unit to stuff up an enemy advance, fortify your backlines, or simply tie down their high value units.

I can see many valid critiques of the way magic is handled, but it being of limited utility or not interacting with other systems is a head-scratcher for sure. The reason it's limited, especially by the mana pool, is because it's incredibly powerful if used sensibly.

At any rate, if you really want to get a pike-and-shot experience out of the game, get the Southern Realms mod, which adds something quasi-similar to the Italian city states in the late 1600s. If you restrict your opponents to other similar factions, the Empire or Bretonnia, you don't have to suspend your disbelief too much.

I feel like you would like Wargame Red Dragon somehow.

Aren't there Med II or Empire mods that would cover the Thirty Years War period, or at least its ethos?

I do! But I'm much too slow for the massive micromanagement required. I had fun in 10vs10s though. But in the end every lobby seemed to have been stacked by pubstompers.

As for mods, yeah, kinda, but most of them are eithwr fairly shoddy or they require playing through the preceding periods first only for the content to run out when the 30yW approaches.

I only play vs the AI, I stack up 4 very hard decks vs me and my 3 moderate allies and play horde defence basically.

Fair, my experience with mods (on Empire) was that they claim to fix the AI but it's just as bad as before plus there are twenty new units per faction. A poorly made game but the setting has this allure I've never managed to vanquish.

It feels like most of your criticisms boil down to "I wanted a historical game, not a fantasy game." Fair enough, but that's not a problem with the game itself. It's like saying you hated Fight Club because you expected a movie about professional boxing.

Also I think some of your statements are just plain wrong, like the idea that terrain doesn't matter or that "battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor." In my experience this is completely false, you will always outperform autoresolve if you play the battle manually, assuming you are remotely competent at the game. Or the statement "Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible." You understand you're meant to pause and unpause the battle, right?

It feels like most of your criticisms boil down to "I wanted a historical game, not a fantasy game."

Well, yes. I explicitly said so, didn't I?

Regarding autoresolve: I'll happily admit to not being very competent.

As for pausing, no, I wasn't aware. My insinct was that I'm meant to play im real-time.

Perhaps it's not the game for you, but if you ever decide to give it another shot I highly recommend playing combat more like a "turn-based" strategy game with regular pausing to issue orders to your troops, use spells and abilities, etc. Makes the game much more enjoyable and allows you to actually formulate strategy and tactics. I probably pause less than I did when I first started, but I'd say pausing 20-50 times per combat is pretty typical.

Victoria 3 is pretty interesting. It's easy to make decisions early on that completely cripple your industrialization, leave you permanently running a deficit, etc. I'd recommend playing as one of the Canadian provinces until you have a handle on the economy: this gives you a benevolent protector (in Great Britain) and access to their market means you can drain their population via immigration once you improve your standard of living and make your "nation" more appealing.

Generally you want to look for goods that are overpriced and then focus hard on developing your production of those goods. Larger factories/extractors = better economy of scale which means you can start to snowball, so a single size 20 steel mill is generally better than various size 3/4 factories. You will want to focus on raw resources initially, and then move up the chain and start producing manufactured goods from those resources (there are efficiency bonuses for using local resources IIRC). Then you plow the resulting revenue into increasing your construction capacity (this is the engine of your economy -- employs lots of workers, but more importantly, consumes raw resources -> driving up their demand -> higher wages, richer capitalists -> more taxes, faster expansion).

Once you have an understanding of how to get your economy off the ground and into a positive feedback loop, everything else kind of clicks into place. It will take some trial and error to figure out what the optimal path is, but the many, many tooltips will provide enough information for you to figure out when something's going wrong. Depending on how well things go, you might be able to form Canada pretty early and opportunistically invade the USA during the civil war and seize some valuable territory. From there the sky's the limit.

Texas is a fun alternative semi-"challenge" start, after you have some experience with the game's systems. Mexico is a prime punching bag with lots of gold mines that, once conquered, can sustain your entire economy for decades with minimal taxation. You won't be strong enough to win a war against them immediately: your first decade or so should be focused on building up the warchest and the technological advantage necessary to steamroll them. If you stay independent (and maybe form an alliance with a European great power to ward off Yankee aggression) you can take California and Arizona (more gold!). Then you can slowly conquer your way down Central America and into South America.

I've played both with regular frequency, though my Victoria 3 skills are probably still fairly mid. AMA

Warhammer 3

I assume you're talking about Total War.

The only reason to play this game is for Immortal Empires, which requires all three games in the series.

Victoria 3

Victoria 3 is a deep game with a steep learning curve. Confusion is common among newcomers to Paradox games, but don't let that stop you. I highly recommend watching a Victoria 3 Let's Play or Tutorial series on YouTube to get a sense of how everything works.

The only reason to play this game is for Immortal Empires, which requires all three games in the series.

Doesn't appear to be true anymore, looks like you just need the first two games/DLCs to access all the factions and leaders.

looks like you just need the first two games

Isn't that what I said? You need Warhammer: Total War I, II, and III to play Immortal Empires.

This is no longer true, you can now play the Immortal Empires game mode having only purchased WH3. You are just limited to the factions in WH3 itself.

It used to be you needed all 3 games to even access Immortal Empires at all. This was changed some time ago.

I see in the Total War's FAQ that is the case now. Great news! Immortal Empires seems fun, but I couldn't get past needing to buy three games to play it.

I haven’t played Victoria 3 but my experience with other Paradox games is that you have to read a few guides and ask questions on the related subreddits to actually understand how to play. You could be 100 hours in and still not be certain about the workings of certain mechanics.

Looking for podcast recommendations on neighborhoods. So far the only ones I've found care about infrastructure & city planning (e.g. Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes). Nobody I've found wants to talk about relationships at the neighborhood level.

It makes sense that real estate podcasts won't due to steering laws. But I'm surprised that I haven't found anybody has taken up this topic yet.

Off to PAX Unplugged for the weekend. Any Philly food recs other than cheesesteaks?

Get an Italian Hoagie somewhere. Carmen's is in walking distance from the convention center so that's convenient, but there's usually a line. There are dozens of hoagie places which do something similar which can be easily searched for.

If you're looking to dine, then Cuba Libre, Zahav or Buddakan are all solid choices in Old City, as is White Dog in U City and Gran Caffe L'Aquila near Rittenhouse.

Roast pork sandwiches. And this place was good when I was there a couple of years ago.

Hit up Penang's for dinner. Excellent rec.

Great! Good to know they are still good. What did you order?

Green curry with shrimp. Just enough coconut for flavor, not so much that it blasted out the rest of the dish.

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