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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Same as any other game really.

    With Pirate Borg there is a really great “sandbox” style thing included with the book that lets players freely explore and roam a large area with lots of dungeons, caves, encounters etc. We had a bigger offshoot story arc that we were following from some previous games in other systems and tied in to a story arc on the island that interested the players.

    With Mork Borg I was trying to do a rapid fire series of lunchtime games over a long campaigns where players were being called upon to do things by this unseen force.

    It was actually a thing that came up during character creation where we gave the group a common background element. The element we rolled was that all the players hear the incessant sounds of the insects and worms that tells them to go places and do things. This is enough to pretty much take any one shots and tie them together as part of something bigger. What that bigger thing is? Who knows. We will figure it out and I enjoy letting the players find meaning in stuff like that to make it powerful.



  • I needed to learn Go quickly for a small little side project and I was able to run through the fundamentals Go track in about a week and a half doing a few exercises here and there.

    I’ve been exposed to quite a few programming languages so a lot of the common principles are there for me. What I really needed was to learn how Go is different and what the unique things about it are.

    For example, I didn’t need to learn about why loops are important. What I did like learning is how a for loop in Go was structured and how to use it in different contexts. Utilizing range was a great thing I picked up from their examples.

    Exercise is a great hands-on tool to supplement and support learning.



  • I love Detroit style pizza!

    For others asking: Detroit style is kind of like Sicilian pizza. Pan baked, rectangular, yeast crust, thick, chewy, crispy on the edges. Bottom layer is cheese. Then toppings and sauce that is usually a stripe of sauce.

    The texture reminds me of old school Pizza Hut pan pizza. Thick, airy, oily, and my favorite part is the little crispy craggy bits on the top edge of the crust.

    In Maryland we have a couple really great Detroit pizza joints. Underground Pizza in Baltimore is my favorite and quite good, but pretty pricey. Rad Pies is a little more remote but is quite good as well.




  • First off, I’m so sorry to hear you were having a bad day. That really sucks and I feel for you, friend. It happens to us all and I hope things look up for you soon! They usually do and stuff like this comes and goes in waves.

    I should not let stranger’s opinion be able to affect me that much. I should be the gatekeeper of my emotions and what I let affect me.

    You can’t always help this. We are emotional creatures. Feeling emotions is just something we do, and you don’t have to check that baggage at the door. You are entitled and valid for having a feeling in response to that situation. In my opinion you’re not wrong about feeling bad/upset either. You should be upset for getting dumped on like that. We just have to be mindful to let it guide our decisions sensibly. Don’t feel bad for feeling bad. You are justified in this situation.

    …realizing I wasted my time sharing my ideas…

    Please, please, please don’t see your contribution as a waste, despite the response you got. The way others respond is not always a great indicator of the quality of your contribution, particularly if you don’t exactly trust those individuals deeply. That’s kind of the problem with online communities like this, not everyone responds affirmatively even if they think it actually is a great idea. It’s hard to really know. It’s absolutely validating when someone outright says it, but on the same hand the negativity, especially if it’s not constructive, should be taken with a grain of salt. For all you know, someone could have seen your idea and run with it already, or come up with something else good based on it. You may never know though, and that’s okay. The intent of putting an idea out there is good, and thank you for doing that. Please don’t stop doing that.


  • Learn when to say no.

    You have to know when you’re approaching your limit. Before you get to that, you have to be able to say no to new things or scale back ongoing things so you aren’t working past your limit.

    As an example, right now with work I’m juggling 3 main things. Working on research for an upcoming project. A project working on some information collecting, surveying and assessments of those results. And some review of business development documents. I’m close to my limit. I have time for them all, but just barely enough. I know my priority right now are the first two. I have already started scaling back on business development reviews. I was doing these as a favor to lend a hand and the other two things are more important.

    I already know if I get asked to do more business development review work, I will say no and decline. I won’t feel bad. I’m certain I won’t get in trouble. I can set the boundaries that I have other important priorities right now. So while I know there’s a lot going on and I sense my limit getting close, I have to protect myself from doing too much that will stress me out and burn me out.


  • First off, OP, I’m sorry that you had to go through that. Hostile responses hurt, particularly when you’re just trying to help. I hope this doesn’t stop you from sharing ideas in the future. We need more people willing to share ideas so we can have good thought diversity.

    That being said, I don’t think this is a good reason to leave Reddit or hate Reddit.

    I know a lot of us are really highly charged right now and the Reddit hate is strong. We got burned by something that was a major part of our lives for many years. But the toxicity of the participants is not exactly a Reddit thing. This is an internet thing. You are not getting away from that here.

    I have had similar experiences as OP on Reddit and I’m also seeing similar behaviors on Lemmy as well, particularly now that it is growing faster.

    Lemmy and federated services in general do not automatically mean that the community is nicer or are more respectful. That is not the problem these services try to solve. They solve issues of ownership and centralization. Even communities like Beehaw aren’t free from this either. I’ve seen some pretty toxic behavior, even on Beehaw. They can’t escape that. But what they can do is set a standard for expected behaviors and then moderate the community as best they can. This doesn’t eliminate the problem, but at least it sets a stage where we can play, and call out when someone crosses the line.

    So let’s not kid ourselves. When people from different backgrounds, views, and intents come together with the capability of being anonymous and behind a screen, the bad actors WILL come and join the fray. That’s just part of internet connected life.







  • Do you think this will change over time where one community on a specific instance will gain the market share and all others will evaporate away? And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?

    To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.

    If you want one platform, that’s what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?

    This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the “pain points” are made more clear.

    One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.


  • This is very important aspect of games from this era and as a huge fanatic of Zelda games it is why Link to the Past is one of my faves.

    On a related note, the game Tunic utilizes this game manual mechanic. It is a similar type game and part of the game is finding pages to the manual around the world that reveal game secrets, maps and mechanics. It’s an absolute delight!


  • I often see this problem in the testing world, particularly around frontend tests that utilize UI automation tools.

    The pattern I see is often to abstract chunks of common steps into individual functions that often live in places very disconnected from the test. While this might reduce the number of lines of code in a test and arguably make it more maintainable it has its problems.

    Main problem number one is that readability has been diminished. It is now harder to understand exactly what this test is doing because steps have been abstracted away. Tests that can be clearly understood, read and describe functionality and behaviors are immensely important to getting others to quickly understand code. I hate to put a barrier there to making that happen.

    Second, i don’t truly believe it ALWAYS improves maintainability. This decision of abstracting carries a risk. When that abstraction needs to change in one place you are faced with a tough choice…

    Does this need to change in ALL places? How do you know? How can you get all places it is used and be certain it has to change in all of them? Changing for all usages is RISKY particularly when there are large numbers of uses and you don’t know what they all do.

    Do i make a new abstraction? This is safer but now starts to create bloat. It will lead down paths of making future implementations trickier because there are now two things to choose from that are possibly slightly different.

    For tests I’m not really convinced that these problems are worth dealing with. Keep it simple and understandable. Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay. I’ll say it again… Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay!