sawall

For others who insanely insist on not running Windows like me, I can confirm that the version you can download from itch.io works in Wineskin on the Mac using these directions: https://re-actor.net/dwarf-fortress-how-to-...he-game-on-mac/

It sounds like it's really hard to navigate your office's politics, what a no-win situation. I hate Western cultural pressures around "work ethics" that include pressure on going to work sick. Kids in American schools would get rewards at school for "perfect attendance" which would sometimes mean "the kid who would come in and get everybody sick".

I am really fortunate that I am on a team that has always been fully remote and never have to deal with anything like that. I can definitely hear what sounds like similar pressure at my current job at their headquarters. They're in a big 5 story building in Silicon Valley that sounds like it's now about 70% vacant so they really want to get as much as they can out of it. I think they're trying to sell the building or lease floors out, so maybe that will get more relaxed for the employees there at some point.

You may not have had covid at all; there have been some nasty colds / flu / RSV going around lately. One of my friends' kids was recently laid up for 3 days with a 39.5C temperature that wasn't covid. And to your point it seems to just not show up on tests for some people. Everybody's immune system is down because our usual dirty mixing was dampened for a couple of years so we may just need some time to build it back up.



Do you mean for covid or in general? I have taken it for a long time whenever I think I might have some cold symptoms coming on, since it definitely works for that per studies that I'm aware of. The tricky thing is you have to take it more by itself and getting too much can reduce your absorption fo some other trace minerals that you also need so it's def not a thing to take all the time.

Did Bay12 do the port themselves? I was always hoping that they would move to building an engine with an API so that it would be easier to build UX against it, but I would also be unsurprised if they decided to do everything themselves based on how history has gone. Two parallel codebases though? Ugh. The two (or more?) years of effort porting to Windows would be untenable for most game dev shops but it's a tiny drop in the bucket of a TWENTY year software project.

My protocols sound pretty similar to Al's and I've still managed to miss it. At this point I am often the only non-staff member in shops who's wearing a mask. At this point I have to assume that I've fought it off successfully at least once; I keep loading up on l-lysine, vitamin D, and zinc whenever I think I am likely to have been exposed.

My other pro-tip is not having kids. That seems to reduce a good amount of the attack surface.

More of a roguelike-like but I recommend checking out Widlermyth. It's a generative TBS game, kind of like X-COM in a high fantasy setting.

It has a heavy focus on story and character relationships that feel pretty natural as you play even though there are random and procedural elements involved. Characters will have romances, friendships, and rivalries with each other which leads to some fun color text and side plots and even has a combat impact. Your rival scored a crit? You have a higher chance to crit yourself because you're competing with them now! There are also a couple hundred story arcs that can appear during your runs and there is a lot of randomization around which ones you get and then where they can go depending on the decisions you can make during them. The stories end up making it feel really immersive and mythic.

Good thought was put into the character class balance and being able to make multiple interesting builds for each class. As you progress it has a roguelike feeling where you have limited choices as far as what your gear and advancement options are, so you have to learn the game to get good at it. You can play in easy mode and just go through all the campaigns fairly straightforwardly, but in harder modes it's just as hard as X-COM. When you finish your campaign you can make your favorite characters 'legacy' which means you can pick them up in future runs (at an appropriate age).

This is a pretty good review:

FIVE DAY COUNTDOWN!

I'm fascinated to see how this is. The demo looked great.

A post from someone who claimed to be an ex-SpaceX employee said that Musk had the same management style over there but, since he started the company, his exec management team developed in a way that was able to "manage upwards", i.e., reframe his crazy asks into things that were achievable. Since he didn't start out as a space expert he trusted the engineers a lot more about timelines and what not. In the case of twitter it's easy for someone who doesn't know better because they've built a website or two to assume that the engineering side of things is really simple and that there must be a lot of dead weight on the payroll. Also none of the management is in place to buffer the underlings from his whims so we are basically seeing what happens when he freewheels without any guard rails

It's kind of amazing to see how much he was able to tank the brand value of the company singlehandedly in days. Big multinational companies don't want their brand showing up beside batshit content and they are more than happy to pull the plug than try to work with him to make it work the way it had been working. It's like he either doesn't understand the basics of how an advertising based company work or he thought that his cult of personality extended to literally everyone and that he could say no wrong. I wonder if he's getting a heavy dose of reality but it seems like he's just going down the same Trumpian victimhood route rather than believe that his shit doesn't smell like flowers.

Anyway I am also trying to be on Mastodon, I grabbed @mirth@mastodon.social back in 2017 when it seemed interesting. I have lukewarm hopes for the platform because I think the admins of various popular servers are going to start having a whole ton of financial, governance, and technical growing pains. I do really LIKE the platform but to Al's point it'll only be really good if all the bands and other figures actually come over there and post and engage. There are a bunch of political writers who I enjoy on there but they'll do a post that gets 5 likes when it would have gotten 5000 over on twitter. So we'll see how long this lasts.

My last tweet was "nope" when Musk announced Trump was being invited back. I downloaded my data but didn't delete my account. We'll see if I stay away or not.

The social media stuff is bonkers

My friend here in Austin has a 17 year old daughter; the boy she dated when she was 15 had 100k followers on tiktok and when they broke up she was flooded with messages from girls shaming her for breaking up with such a dreamboat (who was also a manipulative asshole, but not on social media). Then last year someone made a fake account of her on Instagram and started actively making fun of another girl who was dating an ex of hers. That girl ended up picking a fight with my friend's daughter in the lunchroom and there was all kinds of wild fallout and nobody knew what was true. There's some evidence that the person behind the fake Insta account was some other boy who was trying to white knight in a massively misguided fashion but we'll never know for sure. On one hand it seems like a lot of the same shit that went on when I was a teenager, on the other hand it has the possibility of getting MASSIVELY amplified in ways that could lead to permanent shame scars.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
I went in with lowish expectations and was blown away. It’s incredibly well done all around. Most noteworthy is the fighter jet scenes which are a massive improvement over the original - they went to a lot of trouble to film everything without CGI and in a way that made it really easy to track what was going on. There are a lot of call backs to the original but this would stand on its own as a great film. The love story is a bit unnecessary but there were some great emotional stories between Maverick and other characters. I saw it in IMAX and the action sequences are amazing in that format. 4/5

[oops double post]

Eternals: I sat watching this wondering why they even bothered to make it. Ancient immortal characters are really hard to relate to, and a lot of these ones just seemed pretty aimless during the time of the main action. I just couldn’t find myself caring most of the time. A love triangle with horrible chemistry is foundational to the plot. The only bright spot were a few great comedic bits with Kumail Najjiani. 2/5

Doctor Strange 2: Pretty much agree with everything you two already said. I wanted it to be so much more, with many trips through various multiverses. I gave this a second chance on a rewatch and enjoyed it more the second time through because I wasn’t expecting any awesome multiversity. I love Elizabeth Olsen but Wanda’s motivation feels like a lazy one trick pony. I hope they get off of that because they caused a potentially really interesting character to get stuck on one note. America Chavez feels a little wedged in and I felt like they didn’t do a great job with her character development. She was kind of playing a damsel in distress but they also were treating her like she was a hero and I wanted more meat. The Illuminati were a neat touch and apparently they’ll be using that in some form in the future. 3/5

Moon Knight: I really enjoyed this, partly because I’m into Egyptian mythos. Probably not for everyone but it’s fun and weird and twitchy and dark, but not nearly as dark as, say, Legion. I used to read Moon Knight regularly as a teenager and loved this version of him. 3.5/5 for folks who are coming to this character fresh.

Ms. Marvel: Truly a delight. This is solidly aimed at teens and early 20s but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a classic Marvel coming of age story, so you get a lot of the same plot beats that are in a Spider Man origin story but in this case it’s a Pakistani American girl with a big family. Kalama is known as having her “head in the clouds” which they represent on screen by showing her texts with her friends as animations in the background and on the walls and in other fun ways. Muslim American viewers love this and say there’s a ton of in jokes aimed at them. The actress is incredible and was herself a massive cosplayer fan of the Avengers and Ms. Marvel and feels like the role was written for her. My only nits are related to some of the plot points with the villains but it’s really fantastic. 4.5/5

I’ve watched the first 2 episodes of She Hulk. First one was a lot of set up and I wasn’t super excited by it, but I really enjoyed the groove of the second one. I loved Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black and I’ve got high hopes for her here.

I’m avoiding theaters again so Thor: Love and Thunder will have to wait a couple more weeks for it to come onto Disney+.

I figure the first decent stab at what Meta’s trying to do is going to come out of somewhere more like Blizzard. Facebook isn’t exactly known for FUN and they’ve never done any 3d worlds before. I can’t imagine they will pull anything better off than Second Life and that isn’t saying much.

I haven’t gotten around to seeing this yet, but I did happen by the premiere at SXSW and caught glimpses of Nicholas Cage and Pedro Pascal! One guy up in the front had been waiting forever to get some Mandalorean thing signed by Pedro Pascal (a helmet? a ship? I forget what). Pedro went up and happily signed it then Nic came up behind him and signed it too!

It seems like a TINY BIT of media on the right is starting to listen to what’s happening during the hearings so… maybe it will get some traction? For me, there’s some new info, but it’s not really confirming anything that didn’t already seem blatantly obvious based on reporting at the time.

Glad you made it through, Al! I now know several people who got it outdoors at gigs. My approach has been to wear a mask at them and relocate every 15 or 20 minutes or immediately if anybody near me coughs or seems sketchy. So far I haven’t gotten it but with the most recent virulent strain I feel like it’s only a matter of time. I’ll be on a plane again in 8 days, so….

The Twin Peaks cast made four adverts for a Japanese canned coffee brand with Agent Cooper and other fan favorites. Lots of “damn fine coffee” and thumbs-up which make for a surreal little watch: https://twitter.com/ecto_fun/status/1549885857909334017

I thought it was great. I love the design and color palette, reminded me a bit of early Star Wars in a good way. Everything’s clearly old and used even though it’s all high tech science fiction stuff. I also liked that they are emphasizing the perils of a white savior aspect of the plot that’s clearly in the books but is mostly passed over in the Lynch adaptation. I do miss Sting.

My overall Primavera experience was fantastic this go-around. There were definite hitches on day 1 as described above but they addressed the majority of the problems on day 2. Crowd control was vastly improved by weekend 2, I think they must have hired more security for it to keep thoroughfares moving and so on.

I was a lot more cautious about COVID than much of the rest of the crowd. I would guess that around 1% of the attendees were wearing masks in crowds. I saw a few more people masking indoors but it wasn’t a lot. In general I tended to mask outdoors whenever I couldn’t maintain social distance and avoided getting into the thick of it in the indoor venues. A lot of cases definitely came out of the event - I was on an unofficial discord and there was a #covid-chat channel which featured a lot of festival-goers talking about covid woes, and thankfully most of them self-isolated once they had figured out they had it.

The sound quality was truly amazing. On site food options were generally pretty great. Still one of my best festival experiences all around. Highlight bands:
* 100 gecs
* Low
* Autechre (playing some weird IDM sound bath)
* Fontaines DC
* Beck
* Jehnny Beth
* King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (best name by far)
* Bauhaus (only saw a little bit but fantastic live)
* Gorillaz (way better than my low expectations)
* Squarepusher
* Slowdive
* Charli XCX
* Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Mogwai

So far we’ve all managed to dodge it as far as we are aware, and fenchurch is already on the plane home early. The other two on the trip had COVID three months ago so are pretty highly resistant, so I’m the one being the most paranoid.

Weekend 2 just started and I’m… napping? I’m sure I’ll make it out any minute now.

Well now only I am doing W2, fenchurch has succumbed to heat and existential ennui.

Given how there’s now a #covid-chat in the unofficial Primavera discord that I’m on and what I am reading in there, I might be a little bit more low key during W2. I have been masking pretty consistently in crowds so feel like I have been doing most things right but all of the friendly moshing is definitely causing some viral spread. It’d be especially annoying as a U.S. citizen because I have to wait 10 days after a positive test to reenter the country which would mean some serious annoyances with plans.

Yeah they told me if I came back as a bouncer they’d give me more free beer.

Er I mean yes we will be doing weekend 2 of Primavera as well.

Witnessed an actual bar fight, that’s been a while! I defended the honor of my table mainly by standing and scowling at the drunken Spaniard.

There were definitely a lot of issues on the first day. I think a lot of it is staffing issues due to COVID-related shortages and because the vast majority of the staff are doing this for their first time. Queuing has definitely been a huge problem for us because the beer line is also the WATER line. Apparently there have also been problems with the wireless causing the card readers to get wonky but mine has always worked fine.

They seem to have fixed a lot of things - yesterday there were actual queues instead of a crush of people at the bar, and I’ve noticed there seems to be one senior staff wrangler at each of the bar areas where it seemed like people were winging it before. There are some water fountains that you can refill from for free but they have horrendous queues. An annoyance is that they aren’t letting people bring nonplastic water bottles in and if you have plastic they can’t have a cap. I get the safety concern with not wanting people to have projectiles to throw, but if it’s taking people 15+ minutes to get refills, there’s a much more serious dehydration safety concern they also need to deal with. Just let people haul in their own water!

Crowd safety has been an issue in a couple of the venues. The festival-goers are generally really friendly and look out for each other so I haven’t felt too unsafe but we have been in a couple of situations where there hasn’t been any flow into or out of a stage area. Al will be amused to learn that the worst of the worst is the Binance stage, which has been completely on brand: it has what seem to be interesting products but is overcrowded, poorly regulated, overyhyped, and has no safety guardrails.

All of these quibbles aside we are generally having an excellent time, especially after they pretty rapidly corrected the first day’s queuing problems. The sound is truly world class - we can barely hear anything but the stage that we are nearest even though they are packed in. More later on show highlights!

The mid-run slog is even a bit more of a slog in book form. It does bounce back from that quite a bit.

Later seasons have a bit better budget too. Jeff Bezos is a fan and apparently saved it from being canceled by funding it and rolled it onto Amazon Prime. One of the better evil billionaire moves in recent history, IMO.

IMO Expanse is one of the best science fiction shows, hands down. It’s of the only hard science fiction works that has realistic characters that I care about. Some of the acting could be better, especially in S1, but I just pay more attention to the other actors.

I think the book series and TV series both stuck their landings really well, and the changes made to the TV show made a lot of sense in the context of streamlining and dealing with a compressed timeline. In some cases I think the TV changes were even better than the books - Drummer is now one of my favorite Expanse characters and she’s a mashed up combination of several book characters. Definitely worth reading the books too IMO. The TV series is basically the first six books. The last three books follow a 30 year jump into the future and are full of interesting things including a lot of clearer and plausible reveals about what’s going on with some of the mysteries in the story.