troyunrau

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Oooh, nice! Watched some trailers. Steam version? Or are they better on a console? Both look like they’re PS4 titles as well.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Thanks for the recs! Already played Chained Echoes and quite liked it. Wish it was longer haha. Seen Sea of Stars reviews saying weak on story and dialogue and such, so I backburnered it, but maybe it’s worth it for the exploration elements alone?

Never played Outer Wilds. But seen it recommended before and it’s on my radar. Should it be played on console, do you think? Or is the steam version fine.

I’ll look into the rest when I have time. I appreciate all the details :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Price doesn’t matter. Just want a low bug comfortable experience. Sometimes games are better on one or the other. I liked No Man’s Sky a lot more on the PS4pro than on the laptop, for example – just felt more like it was the right tool for the job :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Steins;Gate is one of my favourites here. And Sam and Max. :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Excellent - thanks!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I have had that one in my steam wishlist for a while, starting with Trails. Never pulled the trigger. I’ve heard that it is very much a slow burn, but ends up being a favourite for a lot of RPG fans. Accurate?

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Been through it, although not since the last update or two. Don’t really want to restart it. Also wish it wasn’t first person :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Never heard of it, but it sounds like a well crafted non-combat game. Niiiice :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Thanks for the detailed reply. I wish my holidays were longer – this one sounds very interesting 🤔

troyunrau, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Paywall. Free info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fra_Mauro_map

And a 5000x5000 pixel scan of a copy: upload.wikimedia.org/…/FraMauroDetailedMap.jpg

And the museum has a much higher res available here: mostre.museogalileo.it/framauro/en/mostre.museogalileo.it/framauro/…/explore.html

troyunrau, 6 months ago

There’s a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called “Battery Man”. Which is funny on a lot of levels. They lean into batman symbols a lot. But also, Manitoba is often abbreviated as Man (historically it was our postal abbreviation and such).

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Qt by a country mile. Wayland is just another backend, and you won’t notice a difference between targeting Wayland and any other platform – unless you’re doing platform specific things in your app (like tray icons, but even then…)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Well, we could walk back from our civilizations total fear of asbestos and go back to asbestos-cement roofs. They’re probably more environmentally friendly than the tar shingles, and are completely fire resistant.

You know – modern safety standards for workers who are making the products, or cutting/drilling/etc. But that would require logic.

There’s a bunch of big fibreglass-based manufacturers in Winnipeg and they equip their people with the safety products they need to avoid breathing dangerous glass fibre dust.

I digress.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

And yet its present as a mineral in many of the mines in Canada (eg: the Thompson nickel mine, most diamond mines, etc.) and no one is dying of asbestosis. So either it’s overblown (everyone adds their safety margin to the numbers up and down the line until the threat of a single molecule…), or the safety mitigations in place in those mines is working.

Like seriously, some of the rock in those mines is 50% asbestos.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

You’re clearly not a geologist. Asbestos refers to a whole group of minerals that have fibrous habits. There are many perfectly safe forms of asbestos that have repeated, common, and constant modern occupational exposure without issues. Serpentinite being the most common found on minesites.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Excellent!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I am really liking Scales, Auto Expand Media, and Open in new Tab. Very nice QoL improvements.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Probably their D&D table used them ;)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I attempt to impale him with my +1 spear of impaling. If I succeed, I get a bonus to intimidation.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Can’t use d12s as caltrops. Checkmate atheists.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Sorting by New Comments will usually find the active discussions

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Can I adopt one?

troyunrau, 6 months ago

tl;dr: carbon nitrides

troyunrau, 6 months ago

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/c36f8947-7b72-4403-b049-3458b3666764.png

troyunrau, 6 months ago

The Great Below – Nine Inch Nails. (About 5 months in 2001 while addicted to Everquest).

The Beginning is End is the Beginning – Smashing Pumpkins (this version: youtu.be/0fDZD46IZ5Q?si=CyfMtrWL7YbtsEs7) (during my undergrad thesis crunch time crisis circa 2009)

There’s more but these are good examples.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Oh, solid track

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I’d argue that even cough and rough are different. There’s probably more.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

An awakened shrub they found standing under a sewer grate, moving around in the sewer as the beam of sunlight shifted about. Discarded by a wizard as trash, it literally grew up with his roots digesting the town’s shit. It grew good berries, and offered the party some when they encountered it in a session one “rats in the sewers” scenario. They immediately adopted it, and it became their mascot of sorts, named “Stem”. I had a great time RPing Stem, with this child-like wide eyed wonder as the party took it out to explore the world with them.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Game reference to Anbennar, a fantasy total conversion for EU4. Highly recommend if you’re an EU4 or Paradox fan.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Yeah, that was me in 2016. Colour me surprised

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Here Geordi. I call this the Riker Reacharound. You’ll know it’s working because of how much attention we’re getting from the ladies in this bar.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Yes, it’s hard to do anything new in fantasy without departing the genre norms and being reclassified as magical realism, sci fi, speculative fiction, weird lit, etc. But really it’s just fantasy without the trappings of the genre.

Some examples:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – a absolute banger of a fantasy novel – gets classified as alternate history. Wut?

A Thousand Years of Solitude – wins a nobel prize in literature – oh, that’s definitely not fantasy, right? Except it is…

Book of the New Sun – it’s got all the trappings of an epic fantasy travelog, even the emo main character. Medieval society, magical artifacts, weird and wonderful creatures (the ones that steal memories are so creepy!)… but no elves, and the setting is post-technology, so it’s sci fi. (If you haven’t read it, and enjoy a challenge, this is a serious recommendation.)

The Fifth Season – it and its sequels win three Hugo awards for sci fi (they aren’t that good in my opinion, but I digress) – but the main character is an earthquake wizard, and the whole thing is basically a magic system. No dwarves though…

So if you’re an author and you’re trying to sell a fantasy scenario that just a little off course, you don’t want to stray too far or you end up on another shelf in the bookstore. So we get Shannara and Wheel of Time and Mistborn and Elric of Melniboné and more and more. Some of it is quite good, but all of it is basically fan-fiction for LotR and Conan. Or Dungeons and Dragons, which is itself LotR/Conan inspired.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

You’re not wrong about Stardust, as that one was explicitly an homage to pre-tolkein fantasy.

American Gods is surrealism or magical realism. I wonder what shelf it’s on in my local bookstore. It belongs on the shelf wherever Marquez, Borges, and Murakami are, in my opinion. Ironically, Tolkein could be a “new” god inside this book, one that is created out of modern nostalgia for the old gods.

One of the ways I ask myself: “is this fantasy that follows the trappings of Tolkein or Conan?” is to rephrase the question as “if you set a D&D campaign in this universe, aside from the local lore, would you have to change much?”

Earthsea very nearly fits. High magic, but not medieval. The tropes were not as established in 1964 when Earthsea was conceived, and Le Guin pushed back against them somewhat. It’d make an excellent D&D setting. I should really reread it. I recently got a nice illustated single volume copy, but haven’t cracked it except to look at the illustrations haha.

Discworld is so much a parody of the tropes, but still contains the tropes. It’s still medieval fantasy with high magic. It would make a great D&D setting if you were looking for a comedy oriented campaign. Hell, it’d be super fun to DM this campaign. Just imagine Death as an NPC haha.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

This isn’t really that ridiculous. Too credible.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

I put something like 500 hours into No Man’s Sky at various points (PC and PS4pro). It was fun! I’ve moved on. But if they get anywhere near that with Light No Fire, I’ll be buying in once again :)

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Yeah, but my laptop cried a lot 😭

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Utility corridor. Sometimes a “Right of Way”.

Depending on where you live, “hydro lines” or “transmission lines” or similar.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

This would be really dependant on circumstances, no?

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Making amateur rockets and pipe bombs are basically identical – for a rocket, one end of the pipe is open. There’s a vibrant amateur rockets community nevertheless.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

It’ll also largely depend on jurisdiction.

Really, I’d ask for a lawyer and have the lawyer advise you here. A misinterpretation and suddenly you’re violently resisting arrest or something.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

There are obviously some roadblocks. We still don’t have a good waste storage facility (all efforts to find one have apparently been stalled by NIMBYism or land rights or, ironically, environmentalism). We also have NIMBYism for actual construction of the plants themselves. And the provinces most likely to benefit are Saskatchewan and Alberta, but the oil lobby is too strong there. But, hey, we can dream right.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Try convincing any remote community, native or otherwise, that you’re building a nuclear waste facility. And if not near enough a community, then you’re looking at having to build out an entirely new community and infrastructure to supply it.

There’s been some attempts – research storage facilities like the one in Pinawa, MB, but they’ve all been shut down.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Just general problems when using lowest bidder based contracting and cost-plus contracts. The same thing happens any time there’s any major project these days: pipelines, transmission lines, hydro plants, etc.

troyunrau, 6 months ago

Remember the Shire!

troyunrau, 6 months ago

That’s not to say that python coding habits are the best either – certainly they’re terrible when translating outside of python (most of the time). And even within python, someone who is used to with only the base modules will write it differently than writing PyQt and still completely different than someone doing numpy code… because the styles of coding of the underlying system change your coding mode. Like, my variables are all CamelCase when doing user interfaces with Qt because it makes sense there, stylistically.