#this server I'm in has become increasingly stressful

[kerosene-saint]

How do you just leave an entire friend group behind by choice. How am I supposed to do this.

[mister-julius]

I got to thinking (dangerous, I know)...

I remember back when there were more "placeholder" bosses in Warframe like The Sergeant. I remember there was constant discussion, of varying intensity, about the concept of "difficulty". How to increase it, how to avoid making enemies into "bullet sponges", the glorious rage brought about by the rise of nullifiers...

these talks lead to some great boss reworks, leading to 'phases' and a greater focus on 'mechanics', which then turned discussion towards the natural frustrations that came from the then-unlabeled invulnerability phases, and similar stuff that had us feeling like we had to wait for the game's permission to continue to play.

With Steel Path and now "damage attenuation" being a part of the game, memories of those earlier days of discussion come flooding back.

See if the game has no power creep, at some point every weapon becomes a choice of aesthetic. We saw this for a time when Dual Swords were the "meta". I remember talk of Dual Kamas Prime being more or less "Yawn yet another dual swords who cares farm it if you want the fashion skip the Prime Access hope the next Prime launch is interesting". Needless to say, this isn't great from a financial perspective, but then there's Mastery...

One of the games many number-go-up mechanics lies in leveling gear to increase a "Mastery Rank". While this might not be important for most, I think it may be most important when it comes to content creators. After all, how much do they actually know about the game if their profile shows that they've only used enough gear to reach MR15 instead of MR30 or the following Legendary ranks?

It seems like a barely-related tangent, but you have to understand that Warframe is very reliant on content creators helping to onboard new players. Going in blind and alone, the game very easily overwhelms most with a sheer barrage of information that's hard to process in one sitting, even if you try sifting through every in-game tutorial.

If every new weapon is released is a matter of taste and not raw stats or unique gimmicks, how long before the people who have levelled everything else start getting so utterly bored that no amount of number-go-up neuron activation can keep them around? However, if every new weapon is better than the last, then what is the point in grinding/paying for it when something better is just around the corner?

If you make it to where every damage source takes more-or-less the same time to chew through a boss, or if every weapon instantly brings a boss to its next brief moment of invulnerability, we wind up asking the same question.

If we take the financial side out of this, as I really shouldn't care since I'm just some random player, be it phases or sponge, the problem Warframe is always trying to get ahead of is players lacking meaningful reason to interact with the many underlying systems that power their loadouts.

That's bad enough of a problem from a sheer game design perspective, but when you add in the financial need to keep releasing new things for people to potentially buy to afford the increasingly-expensive servers that the game's core functions were made to run on

from all I'm able to understand, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things, it seems all you can do is let the pendulum swing between extremes while praying that whatever players are knocked off by each are replaced by new recruits

I wonder how stressful it is to be in a leadership position at Digital Extremes...

[painfullymeta]

In my feels again, tumblr

Back in 2017 or so I wrote a story about anxiety. It was absolutely rooted in the political environment of the moment; it was absolutely rooted in the particular stresses of the moment for someone who passes for cishet and is not. It's about a closeted, neurodivergent (unspecified but he has enough echolalia to be a PITA to write) trans man who is being increasingly hemmed in by the misogynistic component of creeping fascism and is forced to choose whether or not he becomes himself or lets the world win.*

The world is full of choices, and they don't actually get less scary when the moment passes, because gods know those moments are still out there waiting for their chance (if life were made of moments, even now and then a bad one— but if life were only moments, then you'd never know you had one**) and I'm just me. (Am I not hot when I'm in my feelings?***)

Sunday I had a chance to talk with the trans kid who was a big chunk of inspiring my last big in my feels tumblr post and tell him his speech meant a lot to me, as someone who doesn't know what the fuck I am. And to tell him my Tradition has a canonically transmasc god, because it does, and even if he isn't pagan anymore, he's someone it's safe to say that to.

The teens give me life, yo. (Nonbinary kid at the coaster park stabbing into their ice cream cup with a spoon and yelling at their jimmies, "I CAME OUT, WHY WON'T YOU" will live rent-free in my brain forever. In the good way. In the best way.) One of my kids made me a nonbinary flag friendship bracelet. I love everyone in this bar never mind that none of y'all are old enough to drink there.

I spend a lot of pointless brain cycles worrying about how much of my life I'll blow up if I make more of a point of anything. Though at least being at "now accepting all major pronouns and thon" about it makes the casual human interaction a little less fraught. But I loop back around and through the petty anxiety about it all the time.

Anyway. That is all setup for the bit I am actually in my feels about.

I happened to glance at Discord and saw activity in a server for a meatspace social group. So I went to see what it was.

What it was, was a friend who is, as far as I know, cishet, posting this:

Which I suspect he did because a) it's June and b) one of the other folks there has Star Wars as a special interest.

I peered at it, and I peered at my anxiety, and I replied to say that in related content, one of my kids made me an enby-flag friendship bracelet.

Within less than a minute, that comment of mine had a thumbs up react from a cis gay friend who hadn't even been logged in at the time I said it and I am fuckin' verklempt ever since.

It's such a tiny thing, but I have such anxiety about my whole deal in my meatspace life y'all and here's this quiet in-person-person in-community support and it means the world to me and...

... anyway I flapped my hands incoherently at him in DMs because it fuckn mattered. (And I know he can parse "I am too autistic to words usefully here".)

Never underestimate the power of a well-placed thumbs up emoji.

We are more than we're made to be We got more than meets the eye When we stand strong, together you and me We can save the world ****

* "The Company Store" was published in Recognize Fascism, an anthology edited by Crystal M. Huff and released by World Weaver Press in 2020.

** Yeah I'm putting in the echolalia because I talked about Rory's origin story it's just gonna happen that way and also I am deep in Alexithymia Bros right now so I'm talking around my feels. That's from Into the Woods, by the way, "Moments in the Woods", by Sondheim and Lapine.

*** "I'm Just Ken", the Barbie Movie

**** "We Can Save the World", Blaseball: The Musical (The Deaths of Sebastian Telephone)

[roswellroamer]

Day 3. February 1, 2020. Christchurch to Mt. Cook Village. 355km.

After a solid night's rest at our nicely appointed 3 level apartment in the Merivale neighborhood, the task of figuring out the best way to load all the gear/clothes on the bike was the first challenge of the day. With the large rolling duffel left at the bike shop I was pretty confident that everything would fit, but since I would be in a tough spot if it didn't, there was some trepidation as I bought my first pannier liner (borrowed from the Multistrada) down to the bike. The Duc has different sized panniers as one side's volume is cut nearly in half to accommodate and the Italian emphasis on aesthetics. The BMW has frame mounted and equally sized rectangular Givi plastic panniers. Our rental company informed us yesterday that although these bags have a triple clip closures and were supposed to be waterproof, they weren't "New Zealand rain-proof" as the southern and western portions of this island have rainfall measured in feet not inches! 🌧 I brought down the wider bag hoping that it would fit. Murphy once again intervened and it seemed a couple inches too wide. I decided to zip up the expansion section with some side of my body mass the same clothes were smashed a couple inches. Alas, still no go on the bag. So, a retreat to the third floor to rejigger everything. Let's just say I was glad I brought a 70l dry bag for the bike's tail. I needed it once I had to remove some items from my side/pannier. Anyway as I secured my heavier than expected tail bag with my trusty Rok Straps and slipped onto Papanui Road headed for the Southern Alps, I didn't pop a wheelie and felt that logistics weren't now just in need of some tweaking. A system to organize and pack is key to making the daily cycles of unpacking, loading, unloading, repacking an easy and stress-free task. The 70l bag gave me a large margin of error so I did overpack knowing I had this extra room if needed.

Saturday AM brought us little traffic as we rode along the other side of Hagley Park into the Westfield Riccarton area of CHC. A few other bikes were on the road and within 15-20' we started increasing our speed (in accordance with the posted limits, mostly 😉) as we left CHC and development behind. We rode past some of those horse racing tracks and saw a few jockeys wheeling around on their sulkies. For an hour or more we headed west and a bit south enmeshed in a patchwork of farmland. Flat, broken up by Irish style hedges and trees that were manicured and coerced into natural fence lines blocking wind effectively while creating visual barriers. Some small towns and without breakfast (not like me) I was tempted to call for a stop but we were aiming for Fairlie, where a few folks had impressed upon us the need to sample the pie 🥧 in Fairlie. Now when I hear pie, I'm thinking fruit. Usually cherry or apple. But the pies of note on our radar were of the meat variety! I didn't want to ruin my appetite. After a couple hours something changed. We made a turn in the road that wasn't a left or right, but an undulation. Wait, was that a hillside up ahead? All of a sudden we were in the foothills. Gone the flat farms of sheep, cows and agriculture. Now we were winding on increasingly common twisties. As we gained elevation the ambient temp dropped from around 22°C all the way down to 13.5°C (about 56°, still not really cold). We did end up stopping for a light bite in Geraldine at the Running Duck. I had a Coconut Ice (smoothie) and a heated raisin danish. A Ducati monster was parked there and he was stretching out in a chaise type lounger soaking up the sun. Bubba the elephant allowed the local server to locate us outside as most tables were full with travelers. We had taken the inland road which was recommended as more scenic and less traffic. At Geraldine we joined the main commercial road conducting summer crowds up to the Alps and Mt. Cook. A fuel stop there after the danish and off to Fairlie. We chose the Fairlie Bakery and despite the hype, were not disappointed with the buttered chicken and mushroom pie. 😋 We had passed some more interesting farms that included emu, caribou, deer, alpaca along with the more common farm animals. We were now traversing and crossing glacial runoff/moraine. The distinctive turquoise color of the glacial water is visually magnetic. 👀 It is caused by the silt or "rock flour" the water carries and is very distinctive.

Next on the Day 3 hit parade were two stunning glacial lakes. Lake Tekapo and the oft photographed stone Church of the Good Shepherd prompted a photo stop along with a hundred Chinese tourists. It sits near the road overlooking the colorful lake with a view of Mt. Cook aka "Aoraki" in Maori towering to 12,218'. Loads of small RV's everywhere too! #rvlife Riding past Tekapo on to Lake Pukaki which was equally turquoise. Afternoon had brought us a high, thin overcast which kept us from capturing the water's full visual splendor. It is still over 50kms from Pukaki to the end of the road here in Mt. Cook village as you wind up the valley and the glacial run-off becomes a river feeding the lake. There are a number of sizable glaciers here. We are going to tour glaciers by boat later on the ride at Milford Sound so we'll just enjoy the blue glacier ice from the valley floor today. There are a number of well marked trails through the unique alpine environment here as the whole area is a national park. Some trails through woods, others pass over hills to provide panoramic views of the Hooker and Tasman glaciers (the matter is the longest in NZ). Lodging here is limited and we opted to stay at the very nice Hermitage resort. Upon check-in we were informed the room wasn't ready. A bit of persuasion involving the manager whom we requested promptly solved the 1 1/2 hour previously proclaimed delay for a room not yet ready and a corner room with a spectacular view was provided. 😊 We're gonna explore the area for a bit now and hardly think the pics will do today justice but I'll attach 10 to follow. The weather has held off and so far no rain. Tomorrow is supposed to be different but we'll see if the meteorologists are again proven to be inaccurate. We walked through a heavily wooded seemingly tropical path on the way to a dinner which was accompanied by some dense bushes, trees and stairs. A bit of interesting history regarding Aoraki. Sir Edmund Hillary, a Kiwi born in Auckland who is best known for being the first man to climb Everest, cut his teeth on this mountain. 6 years prior to his successful assault on Everest with Tenzing Norgay he was learning the skills needed for the Himalayas right here. https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/28327/hillary-and-ayres-on-aorakimt-cook-1947 Mt. Cook has claimed over 80 lives this past century.

[scarletttext]

The plot twist to this can be that by "unshakeable faith" might mean that the soldier simply knows how capricious and literal assholes the norse gods can be. The mythology on them doesn't shy away from it either, while they can be good they are well known for being very close to humans in terms of personality - the bad side, such as arrogance, belligerency, pettiness, being damn manipulative and nosy. It's actually one of the things I like on norse mythology: they didn't actually glorify their gods, it was more something out of respect and lessons to be learned.

That being said, I imagine it being something like this:

"All I could register for a scary long while was the pain, in my whole body. I didn't think I would ever feel something else, it was excruciating. But then, as soon as it came, it stopped.

I sighed in relief, "the doctor must have found me and given me a shot of morphine", I thought. But then, I started to pay attention to my other senses, and I couldn't fathom the sheer silence that surrounded me. It wasn't full on silent, but it sure wasn't the battle field I record being in the middle of when I first passed out. When that realization dawned on me, I made sure to keep my eyes closed, scared of what I'd find when I opened them.

"Okay then, let's check ourselves out", I muttered , reverting to the old, pre-war habit of mumbling to myself when I'm stressed, "mechanical legs, functional, just need some oil where it meets what's left of my original legs". While muttering, I was moving my body, simultaneously feeling the place I was laying, and becoming increasingly aware that I was definitely no longer on earth, because I could feel grass, and warm sun rays in my skin. "Enhanced mechanic arm... Working fine, weapons probably need more ammo, blades are all fine and intact... Ouch, yeah, I need to fix that shoulder, it's pulling on my bone again, damned bomb that took my arm"

When I could no longer stall, I opened my eyes, attesting to my thoughts of no longer being on earth, our little Terra no longer has a blue sky or such comfortable, non-skin-burning sunshine. The sheer surprise made me think of how all of that came to be...

To sum it all up: a bunch of assholes decided that the fucking nazis, all the way back on the 1940's, were right. The problem was that it started small, and no one reacted to them like we should have, by squashing them down, and then it kept growing, and growing, and another plague, à la Covid-19, gave them the opening they were waiting to strike. Suddenly the horror stories I read on my 20th century history book were happening, people started to disappear, and since no one was expecting it, the good people took way too long to organize. We couldn't depend on any government, a lot of them actually allowed, some even helped, all of it to take place, so it was down to the people to fight, to take means into our own hands. I felt like I was living in a dejà-vu, even though the second world war was already a matter of history books at the time of my great-great-great- great- grandma, and this time, there was no single physical target to aim our fight against, they were everywhere, and it was down to me, at the time already missing one leg, and my fellow friends.

We were doing all we could, and we were damn good at it.

Like every ''conservative bigot'', the neo-nazis had very little in terms of strategic mind, creativity and brains. They only had their big guns, but, much like they were spread like cockroaches over the earth, so were we, and we were the artists, the builders, the servers, the scientists, the biologists, the mechanics, the historians. They brought their guns and we brought our inventions, but the earth suffered greatly with out war. Some of ours managed to build underground facilities, and transport animals, plants, everything we could, but we lost a lot too. Since the nazis sadly had the support of a lot of governments, early on we lost a lot to their aerial bombings, we were lucky that humanity had agreed to get rid of nuclear weapons about a century prior, else there would have been no fighting, just death. It was during one of those bombings that I lost my other leg and my arm, I was fleeing alongside what was left of my family, fully intending on lending my bio-mechanic and crazy mechanic-scientist knowledge to the good guys, when one of their bombs dropped into the hospital our group was bunking down for the night. I was rescued, luckily, very fast, and they managed to save what was left of me.

I'll save you the details, but what happened was: I survived, my family didn't, I only had my memory, some belongings and one arm left. I brainstormed with the best mechanical minds on our side, and volunteered myself as the test-dummy for our theories on how to fit permanent, paper-light, carbon titanium prosthetics on human bodies without rejection from the organism. Then I was the head of the inventions team on how to make those prosthetics mechanic, fully functional and, in the case of the motherfuckers like me who were delirious with grief and anger, make them into functional weapons in a safe way for the user. Needless to say, I was successful, and the scientists from all over the world started to work on my drawings in order to create full on mecha suits, for those of us who were able-bodied and were on the frontlines. I remember thinking before all that: the disabled people would probably be the ones to fare better in such situations, because we simply always had to think outside the box, in order to simply get around, so it was no surprise for me that us, disabled people, were in the head positions in a lot of areas when the war rained down on everyone.

All of that was going through my head, while laying around in a place that, clearly, was very far from my own earth. But hey, I was breathing clean air, my body was mostly intact, in spite of my last memory being of falling at least 20mts after an explosion, there were no nazis in the vicinity, so for me, that was the best day ever since the beginning of the war. I had a fleeting thought about the Old Gods, the ones I prayed to every night between battles, every morning before I donned my body armor, loaded the weapons in my mechanical arm and left with my people to the frontlines. The Old Gods of the north, used by the ancients to teach about what NOT to do, and also about wisdom, a heavy bit of manipulation, but, mostly, about surviving and being strong, having honor enough to deserve Valhalla, the heroes' halls. To relax and be happy, to fight only one last time before the true end.

It was as if the thought of Valhalla sent a boost through my spine, and then I was sitting up and looking around... And woah, the place was beautiful. There were mountains on the distance, and I could see real ice on their caps, I was on a hill, and just to my right, in a gentle downwards curve, there was a huge, beautiful castle. I hastily got up, and started to make my way there, if this was the God's Hall, I wanted to see how it was inside. I was nearly sure I was dead either way, no harm in snooping around a bit.

It came to mind then, that if this was really Valhalla, that meant I'd meet at least Odin, and I had no idea what he'd think about the fact that my way of faith was to simply pray that they never got mad at me and decided to smite me with a bolt without any warning. But hey, I'd soon find out, because I was already right at the doors of the castle, unsure if I should knock or nah.

''You know, the door won't open itself'' a rough, male voice said from behind me, scaring the living daylights out of my mostly mechanical body. I spun around, coming face to face with a tall, seemingly very old man, with only one, brightly blue, eye.

''O-Odin'' I gulped. The man simply lifted one eyebrow at me.

''Well, at least you recognize me'' He passed me and opened the huge, wooden doors, and I simply gaped at the huge entrance hall '' well, are you staying there all day? Frigga made a delicious dish, you're the first one here in centuries, strange metal human''

Turns out, the Norse Gods were simply chilling in Asgard, blissfully unaware of the huge war going on on Earth, they simply didn't understand why no more ''Midgardians'' ended up in their halls. Well, I took that as a personal challenge, I'd try to convince these Gods to go back to Earth and help put an end to those fucking nazis, I think Lord Vidar might side with me, wish me luck.

For the first time in centuries the halls of Valhalla received a new arrival, a soldier of the third world war boasting mechanical prostethics and unshakeable faith of the old norse gods.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN JUDGE

When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. Different languages are good for different tasks. This time the evidence is a mix of stuff from the headers and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs. In a desktop software company, this would have been too late. In defend-a-position writing that would be a well-paying but boring job at a big company, this would explain why you have to fix it. What you want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out how we use the word. When we started Viaweb, hardly anyone understood what we meant when we said that the software ran on the server, it would be useful for other kinds of filters too, because it meant we didn't have any plans. If there's just one point, they're identical: the average and maximum are the same.

To developers, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working, and their performance improves. One question that arises in practice is what probability to assign to words that occur more than five times in total actually, because of the doubling, occurring three times in nonspam mail would be enough. He likes to observe startups for a while at least. I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will there be in a hundred years. At big companies, because their software is probably going to be possible to do much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next release. You'll have to adapt to the whims of investors. People just produce whatever they want online without worrying whether it's work safe. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on. Those few that inevitably slip through will involve borderline cases and will only affect the few users that encounter them before someone calls in to complain. Fred is. Because seed firms are companies also means the investment process removed that stress, we'd make a list of such words and mail containing them would automatically get past the police to get up to an apartment that overlooks the president's route. And strangely enough, the better.

This is an instance of a very important meta-trend, one that Y Combinator itself has been based on from the beginning: founders are becoming increasingly powerful relative to investors. Republic occurs in Nigerian scam emails and this spam. You need that resistance, just as there are in the real world. Someone probably will eventually. At each step, flow down. And funding delays are a big distraction for founders, because you don't have to do, instead of what he called essais. Well, that's news to no one. How did things get this way?

In a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. So you can still get large returns on large amounts of money; you just have to spread it more broadly. A good deal of programming of the type that we do today. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point in size of chain at which it stops? So we are working on it. But I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we thought very carefully before we released software onto those servers. Angels have a corresponding advantage, however: they're also not bound by all the rules that VC firms are organized as funds, much like hedge funds or mutual funds. No, not generally.

I only consider words that occur in one corpus but not the other. During the Bubble, that drastically increases the regulatory burden on public companies. Whatever Microsoft's. Either it's something they felt they had to do to get more people through the test drive. But I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. Aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the deal fell through. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the future of startup investing, realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself to behave that way. Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his work be guided by duty, but duty is no guide in making things. They're increasingly rare, and they're right. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means to try.

That wouldn't seem nearly as uncool. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be a case of premature optimization. Viaweb we spent the first six months just writing software. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly. If anyone wants to take on this project, it would affect at most one merchant, could probably be hushed up, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor. The contacts and advice can be more powerful than our first PR firm got through the print media are competing against. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. But for what it's worth, as a high school kid writing programs in it. So the more confident you are, the more outliers you lose. Everyone knows you're supposed to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. Investors will probably find they have to get all the way to get fast applications is to have many layers of software between the application and your operating system.

Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in the early 1960s, but many companies continued to write code in machine language. It's one of the biggest IPOs of the decade? If you think of using Lisp in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. I thought before Viaweb, to the extent I thought about the question at all. Founders understand their companies better than investors, and time always more than you spend. With Web-based applications, these two kinds of theoretical knowledge had to be delivered. It's oddly nondeterministic. It solves the problem of the headers, the spam of the future will probably look something like this: instead of a fixed round size, startups will do a rolling close, where they take money from the general public you're more restricted in what you can extract from a frivolous question? When a company loses their data for them, it's a fine-sounding idea to say that angel rounds will less often be for specific amounts or have a lead investor manage an angel round before going to VCs. If several VCs are interested in you, they will sometimes be willing to split the deal between them. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good and bad. This is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit vote up if you believe such-and-chug undergrads, who are called general partners, get about 2% of the fund annually as a management fee, plus about 20% of the fund's gains.