@flesh I was thinking about adding some nuance to include games that can be beaten in like 30 minutes to 1 hour or so, where part of the point is to play them repeatedly. but I eventually decided against it lol

but yeah Hades is actually a great example! I only played for around 8(?) hours but I can totally see how getting the ending could require “beating the game” multiple times

years of exposure to storytelling media has taught me that giving a stranger control of my emotions through storytelling is Bad Actually

also don’t do whatever the fuck Inception was trying to do with its ending. I will complain about that ending for ten thousand years

don’t gate narrative closure behind multiple playthroughs of a game. it can be a nice bonus for dedicated fans to be able to unlock stuff by completing the game multiple times, but the first ending that players see should not feel like a bad ending or like it’s deliberately unsatisfying

this post inspired by Gato Roboto and Silent Hill Lowercase F

Since I get asked a lot about how I got into lockpicking, I figured I'd make a big ol' post about it.

Well, I have the nerdiest backstory for this skill.
So without further ado...

First, the setup:

I helped make 5th Ed. D&D.
I regularly played in a campaign with friends.
I often played some sort of lovable rogue.
I also roll natural 1s *way* too often.
This became a running joke in-game.

Next, the inciting event:

One day, after rolling a natural 1 and failing to pick a lock on a chest, setting off a trap, and then getting taken to death's door by said trap, I decided I was going to figure out how hard it would be to do IRL (with modern locks and homemade tools, which I figured would be *way* more difficult than medieval locks).

So, after game, I drove home, grabbed my kid, and said we're going to the hardware store for SCIENCE!

Now, somewhere in the back of my head was the notion that street sweeper bristles were suitable for making lockpicks (probably from reading the Anarchist's Cookbook, Poor Man's James Bond, or something like that as a little kid). So we looked in the gutters along our walk to the hardware store and managed to find two bristles by the time we got there. I bought like $50 worth of assorted locks, and we walked home.

Once home, I watched a YouTube video just to see what the tools they were using looked like, and then found a small file and some pliers, and made a simple lockpick and turning tool. Then I set to figuring out what the heck I was doing through trial and error.

By the end of the night, I'd opened all of the locks I bought (at least once), and I had my answer—a professional rogue with decent tools should succeed at picking most common medieval locks about as often as they succeed at tying their shoes.

Unbeknownst to me, I'd rolled my own natural 1 on my save vs. falling down the rabbit hole. So now, a decade later, I've taught at conferences, placed in tournaments, been sponsored by a security company, created (and eventually deleted) my own locksport YouTube channel, and have hundreds of locks in my bedroom. Over the years, I branched out to all sorts of locksport-adjacent skills, but picking is still my favorite, and I regularly teach new folx how to pick locks and improvise tools.

So that's it. That's how being a total nerd led me to discover what turned out to be one of my biggest passions in life—defeating other folx' security for fun.

Pictured: (left) my first turning tool, (right) my first lockpick.

#DnD #DIY #Locksport #OriginStory

really insightful (IMO) video about what makes indie games stand out on Steam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiBDyZ-Pf2M

You are a very busy, very important professor publishing very important work. Do you
a) just publish the code and data along with the paper because you know your work will survive close scrutiny and you have better things to do
b) spend your time handling individual data requests, negotiating over the scope of data shared, and re-describing individual analysis steps that are unclear in the methods

since posting one's ffxiv character seems to be going around our circles, here are the glamours we have for some of us who play (digitally simulated eye contact in pics)

Hover to show content

Hover to show content

Hover to show content

Hover to show content

maybe my experiment for the day will be “can kas make soggy grape nuts”

source:

How do we pack all that goodness into those crunchy little nuggets? Originally, C. W. Post prepared a batter that came out of the oven as a rigid sheet. He then broke the sheet into pieces and ran them through a coffee grinder to produce the “nut”-sized nuggets.

https://www.grapenuts.com/our-story/

grape nuts are what happens when you put hard tack in a coffee grinder. that’s not an exaggeration or a joke that is actually how they were originally made

grape nuts are actually an interesting solution to the problem of soggy cereal. they are basically inedibly hard unless you soak them in milk, at which point they soften enough to be chewable. I’m not even sure if it is possible to make grape nuts soggy lol. if so I feel like it would take quite some time

it still thinks that fedi servers should just allow inline css in posts and most html tags. fedi devs are just boring

@dragon the [MEOW] key is bound to alt by default :3

if I ever learn how to make games, I want to make my take on the RTS genre as someone who doesn’t like RTS games but who likes a lot of things about them

it would be a chill exploration game like Pikmin 2 without the time limits, where you gather resources and then use those resources to go on expeditions into dungeons, with resource-management being a very important mechanic for those dungeons

also you would be an alien hive mind so if your units die it’s kinda like stubbing a toe for you and not like a sentient creature being robbed of life. also that explains why you have to directly control every unit manually instead of being able to delegate tasks which is what an actual battlefield commander would do

@ghostlyash omg wait seriously? I kind of assumed that you would be sick of people calling you hot/sexy/beautiful/etc. by this point

I'm not even talking open source. I get it, folks think that's nerd shit and glaze over. I'm talking "can you run software in devices you own, even when the manufacturer of said device doesn't want you to?"