neonrev

Anyone have any advice getting a game to run in a wine wrapper? My GF is absolutely in love with this game from playing one 5 hour stretch on my PC, but she's a mac lady and would basically colonize my office if I let her start using my computer for this. I have very little mac experience, but there is an extant Wine wrapper on the chucklefish forums.

I think I must have just hit upon the natural fishing progression because I found the level-up curve very easy and fun. I find it actually follows real fishing better than the vast majority of fishing games I've played. I don't have any real advice for actually catching the fish besides letting you know that they do have distinct patterns of movement for each kind of fish. Try and learn how the fish moves on the bar and it becomes much easier, especially when you can predict its movement. Yes, it's like the level 2 or three foraging skill level. Just keep choppin' Edit: Whoa, wiki tells me it's lvl 1 foraging. Maybe try looking for some of the berries and flowers that spawn around the map? I hit lvl 1 foraging real quick and was throwing away seeds for the longest time.

I was right there until I noticed the field snack crafting recipe, it's one of each of the three tree seeds for a decent-enough food source. I have never spent any money on food, and now that I have a kitchen I'll have to see if cooking is worth it. I just did nothing but fishing after crop-watering for most of the summer. Once you find a good spot (location and time do matter, which is sweet.) and you level up your fishing a bit you should be able to have a baseline fishing income of slightly less than a thousand per day, more if you go to the beach to collect shells and unlock the tidal pools to collect coral in the morning. It's a bit of a drag making money from most things until you can consistently get silver or gold crops or fish. Save money for the fall, it's the most profitable time of the year for planting. Cranberries rock and make delicious and profitable jelly. This would have been a handy tool for preventing my farm looking like a confusing mess: https://stardew.info/planner/# What I really want is a crop planner, with growth times and regrowth times and seasons.

Picked this up, it's really quite good. Honestly, in a holistic sense it might be the best game I've played in a long time. I can't really complain about any aspect of it, except for the most middling of things (Inventory feels a little clunky, the map is really big and it takes forever to walk places) and those are fading into the background fast, and kinda making everything more satisfying (I shouldn't bring every tool to every job, and having to plan the day around an hour or two of walking actually provides some meaning to those decisions. It's... weirdly lifelike? Actually reminds me a little of a summer spent gardening for a farmers market.). I did find one bug though, anyone else have this? If you scythe at a basic wooden fence it duplicates it without removing the original fence, seemingly twice per fence piece? It's kinda handy actually, with the fence decay and all. A tiny bit of research suggests it's only an issue with the GOG version of the game. It gets a little annoying when you are actually trying to scythe down crops surrounded by fences though.

I, for what it's worth, was also excited to see your name pop up. You were around when I was first seriously reading the forums. Hi! My car's been broken down and I just carried (walking) a 12-pack of beer back home. It was not only a pain to carry, but I felt oddly bad every time someone passed me and saw me carrying it. I feel you.

Drones. Semi-autonomous, potentially directly controlled weapons platforms. Being flown, literally right now, somewhere. We clearly have no issue with machines doing fighting for us. 'Big-dogs'. Mobile, heavy-lifting, all-terrain, stable and self-guiding platforms, already modeled and displayed as combat vehicles at weapons shows. Bomb-defusal and recon machines. Currently in use by pretty much every police dept. and military force who can afford it. R&D of human shaped robots is irrelevant. Lots of robots look nothing and act nothing like people. The uncanny valley is irrelevant because of that. The fact that it's a vehicle is irrelevant. Anything non-living that moves under its own power is a vehicle. A bottle cap from a twisted water bottle is a vehicle for crying out loud. Robots, either autonomous or controlled (A pointless and idiotic distinction people make by the way. A program is just an asynchronous, predetermined action by a person. A remote control, AI or a pre-programmed response differ only in when a decision is made and how; either right now on purpose by a person or a while ago by a person.) are super obviously currently serving a number of active, violent and serious purposes. Some of those involve bombs, placing bombs, identifying people to kill and killing people. I can't imagine your point, literally everything about it is either untrue or lacking in information, at least to me. Even cars SHOULD be terrifying. It's, after all, just a vehicle, and even under the direct control of a person. Yet they kill thousands every year, more than many other 'scary' things. I'm really quite drunk, so I might be a bit too harsh here, but man, it's like reading the robot version of a Russian gov't employed troll. And here I thought I loved the robots too much. I guess I flip-flop.

Fuck me sideways, that birch bark. Those stars. Those rock and cliff models. Incredibly evocative to me. Such small details. Like a perfect merger of impressionism and realism.

On that first point, weird political scientists have you covered. The same groups, people and governments that already engage in gov't supported oppression are totally ready and able to use robots to achieve those *same abusive goals. Racism could trivially be a part of robot cops' programming anyway. It all depends on the programmer/engineer at that point. (*sorta coldly and academically trigger warning worthy I would guess.) On the second, yeah, no, robots could only ever be even more efficient at the same sort of horror that humans so readily engage in personally. They could also be pretty amazing at the sort of selfless shit people get up to personally. They literally, definitively, don't care at all what they are doing. It's a weird question. I still love the robots. People do horrible shit everywhere, always, and often times just for the opportunity to do it. Robots have to be made, expensively (for now) and are thus more useful for the stuff it's harder to get people to do willingly, like risk their lives, but are still worthwhile. I'll bet the first robot pulls a person out of rubble before the first robot shoots a person. It's way easier to get a person to shoot a person. (Anecdata: I know one firefighter, one EMT and around 10 or 20 soldiers in my HS class alone. I literally cannot imagine a more "SERVE YOUR NATION, RISK EVERYTHING FOR AMERICA, BE A HERO" place to grow up in than mine. It's super-duper easy to get someone to want to shoot people, way harder to want to get them to spend hours digging to find a single trapped person. People will be shooting all sorts of people for decades to come. We love it apparently.)

Which I think ultimately matches up pretty closely with how urban development, people, taxes and local gov't interact in the real world. Or at least the way the people in local gov't think about it. Without a number of simulationally impossible systems thrown in. Also they're always white, male and business and family focused. Close enough. America.

No, I'm certain that's totally real. It drives me up the wall too, and it seems to be mostly adverbial and plural forms of commonly understood but not used words. It's juuust good enough for it to not be a constant pain, but that often enough that I'm sure that use case generates at least some revenue.

Tonight my best friend in the world, my closest mental and psychological partner, my fellow German-Ukrainian immigrant, my distant relative, and my eternal sibling by our choice came out as trans. I've known about that feeling of theirs for a while now, and I could not possibly be any prouder of them. God and the universe did not see fit to allow my biological brother to live, and I could not ask anything for a better replacement or surrogate in any way than Reed. I'm happier and prouder right now than I could have possibly have ever guessed possible. My brother (they're okay with that word, we've talked. There's no closer word to describe us I guess.) is stronger, braver and less fearful than I could possibly have hoped for or than I I could possibly be. I can only hope to live up to their example. I just feel like bragging and honoring them. I love'em like I can't even say. Heroyam slava.

I'm really impressed by what people are saying about this demo. I'm intentionally not playing it, and intentionally just barely skimming the posts in this thread, but from what I'm hearing here and elsewhere, I'm not just happy that the game sounds so good but impressed and proud as a fan that the Campo Santo crew seems so close to my years of knowing them on the podcast and their dreams and goals for a more independent game and it's presentation. I'm finally getting the occasional hipster feeling of; "Oh, that Firewatch game? Yeah, I've listened to them talk about everything for years, they're really going for their dreams here. Oh, it looks amazing? Of course it does, listen to them talk about anything for a couple of hours and you'll get it. That's basically what they care about, presentation and story." or "Oh, it looks like a boring 'story game'? Listen to them talk about other games for a sec, you'll be disabused of that bullshit notion in an an hour or two."

Man, I wish I had better advice for you, but for an older cat with severe digestive issues, all you can really do is try to balance what she wants to eat with what causes her and you the least pain in passing that food, and cleaning up that passing. There are less fatty and more fibrous (which seems like the problem there) cat foods available, but it's hit and miss whether they'll eat it willingly. We did switch to soft food and it works better for us. Cats are obviously really picky, but what's the point of having a cat that hates it's older years of eating? That and sleeping/cuddling are their main happy things in my experience. 13 is old as hell in cat terms, treat her like you would an aging human family member and you'll both end up okay. On that note, my childhood cat (Jasmine the orange kitty) is getting to about 15 or 16 (she's a rescue, we don't know for sure) and she's definitely feeling it. She still eats (with soft, arthritic kitty food) and poops fine, but her mobility is really suffering and it's hard to watch her trying to jump from floor to my mother's voluminous breasts on the couch like she used to (her favorite place. God bless fat German mothers.), or even her using stairs or jumping to the entryway stool to grind her claws against your pant's belt area. Basically her cat joints stop her from doing her traditionally favorite things, and it's hard to know whether it's her time or if she'd like a bit more of staring out that window at the local intruding ducks and pheasants. We've talked about her possible end (and putting her down), but I'm really afraid of getting a phone call about her falling off some dumb shit and getting really hurt or her just dying under some furniture and being alone for it. We all know the end is near, but I'm selfishly afraid of her dying so far from me at some random time and I don't know how to think about it. I don't want her to be alone when it happens, but my country-style parents see that as the natural end of a cat's life, and don't really want to pay a guy to kill our kitty, which I understand. I don't know what's right here.

I feel weird about him dying. I've been a huge fan of his as long as I could read, and one of the most influential parts of his writing for me has been his writing about death. My family has a history with Alzheimer's, and I'm slowly watching both my grandfathers progress further into the disease. It's been consistently there in the lives of the last 2 generations on both sides of my family, and more prevalent on the male lines. It's heartbreaking, and personally terrifying knowing that as of now, I'm just watching myself 50-odd years in the future. One of the few things that's provided me comfort about that fate is Terry Pratchett. I know it's a long way off for me, but knowing that there is a guy who shares the same endpoint as me and who isn't afraid of it, and moreso uses that anger to create such amazing books is deeply, deeply inspiring to me. It's also made me less afraid of dying in any way, and made me appreciate my life and the lives of everything around me. The most amazing thing, I feel, is that this is true even of his books from before he was diagnosed. He lived a long, rich life before he knew it was ending with an ethic I could only come to with a selfish worry about my own life. He was an amazing man. I don't know how to feel, but I feel both horrible and almost relieved that it ended for him the way it did, and that makes me feel worse, and then I imagine he'd call me a selfish ass for wishing he'd had a few more years, and then I feel more bad because he'd be right and I still would feel the same way. The death of a spirit and life only begins when it is no longer spoken or thought of. Long may he live. (PS If you can, burn a fire tonight. If the old gods are still there, no one I know deserves their attention right now more than him, and if they aren't, he'd still appreciate it. Win-Win.)

So, I don't know if this is just a weird personal thing or not, but despite the terrifyingly violent purposes these things seem suited for, I am, as a tornado impact area experienced guy, am really excited for the possibility of a number of unmanned, untiring robots searching for my possible friends and family trapped underneath rubble with greater speed and accuracy than normal humans. I get that it's not "Big Dog" style commentary, but it's really hard to come to an opinion on such creepy robots for me when I can imagine one of them either finding/and or recovering my sister or parents in the rubble of my old house or school just as easily as them gunning down protesters that the gov't would rather not be protesting. Or military things or whatever. Robot news is not so cut and dried bad, I guess is my point, and also that it's strange that people from the Bay Area, who are even more at risk from natural disasters than me are so afraid of such things. Not that they're serious or anything, necessarily. I'm the guy cheering on the robots as they stomp on our heads in the interest of our safety, I suppose. I'm okay with it. Humans suck anyway.

From experience (also not knowing the situation I guess), I think if you're feeling that it's necessary than it's probably far more than necessary. I wish I had had that conversation with my previous roommates (collage dorm neighbors and friends) before everything fell apart at the end and the transition got way, way worse because all the tension was left unsaid when it came time to move away (I was homeless for about a week because of it. Always have an emergency floor to crash on if necessary is the lesson there.) Living with people sucks, mostly.

I have that exact issue as a dude. I feel incredibly uncomfortable with the entire idea of receiving oral sex even if it's the desire of and initiated by my partner. There's really not a good cultural point of contact for it if you're trying not to be an asshole, and all I can think about is how horribly it's used in basically all media, and just don't want to even unknowingly be a part of it. I don't know of a good way to get around that, and I don't think just accepting that sexuality is sometimes weird and seemingly socially degrading is the right answer. Or maybe it is and I don't understand the other side of receiving heterosexual oral sex. Forgoing a personally sensitive sexual act seems like a small price to pay for not feeling like a creep though.

Hey now, I have that as a signed print of that over my desk RIGHT NOW. It gives me VIGOR. I demand a signed and public retraction of that statement. #NOTALLXKCDFANS

Nah, I'm saying they've put forth an image of trying to create a system where you can do different things with a prison in the interest of morality, but then made a game where you either simulate a gulag or a spend a while running a gulag while researching a reform camp. Real prisons actually do have accountability to laws regarding access to healthcare, visitation rights, access to reform and rehabilitation programs. In PA it's an upgrade so you can have more systems to manage, basically a self-chosen difficulty meter of complexity, and that's an even grosser depiction of how prisons work than reality. It doesn't even touch the real reasons prisons are horrible, it just acts like it does, and the world really really doesn't need anymore crappy examples of how the incarceration industry works. That it's introversion, whose previous work exemplified theme through mechanics, making this game that is so clumsy at making a point it doesn't actually make is all the more bothersome. DEFCON was amazing, but it was representing death on a massive scale in a much colder and impersonal (An realistic, I'd say) way than PA does anything. Introversion makes great games when they focus on mechanics as a way to represent an experience, and seeing them screw up the theme (I think) of their first more visually polished and mainstream game is just saddening.

Okay yeah, I was tired and didn't get the representative thing. Just got to thinking on it. It really just isn't actually about prisons, yeah. I keep waiting for the mod community to do a more comprehensive reskin of the thing. I think the building, time scheduling, research and layout style would really compliment a summer camp or school theme. Trying to layout the school so people can get to classes on time, making sure enough space and food is available for lunch time, dealing with the limitations of preexisting buildings and layout with a growing student body. Trying to fit all necessary construction and refurbishment into short summers. I really want that. If you watch their videos that introduce each update it gets even more confusing. They're pretty bought in to their own simulation, which is a danger in that field I guess, but they seem to think it's a fairly accurate simulation with some funny bugs and missing parts. I hope that means they have a more complete, more realistic view in mind that they see instead of the shitty state it's in now, but each new update seems to add more ways to use your prisoners, more ways they can be bastards to you and each other, and more ways to 'control' them. The game provides so many more ways to treat your prisoners like the opponent rather than people to be helped or even people who need to be punished in the interest of justice. They're just faceless assholes at the moment. And yeah, while it's not the only issue with the depiction, you totally have to pay to research the ability to provide medical care, and even then almost every player will do it to get the grant money from setting up basic medical services. That's true of visitation, psych care, drug treatment and other social aid too. It's just weird.

I don't think it is representative (I think I might be misunderstanding your point there though) of what the game actually plays like. It implies this very personal, very serious management of a small prison and a serious take on the terrible realities of the justice system, but then the game never really makes you care or even know any of your prisoners, their in-game randomly generated crimes are either ridiculous lists of petty or violent crimes with no care to if any of it makes sense together, you can basically shove a couple dozen dudes in a single room with a toilet and enough beds and they'll be fine with it, the actual realities of the justice system are all (surreally) locked behind an upgrade tree (Research "Visitation rights." "Healthcare" "Prison Labor") and you don't actually have to engage all that much with them, and in my experience you basically get to choose between a gulag style prison labor camp or a nordic style full-rehabilitation prison. I still love the actual mechanics of setting up blocks and rooms and whatnot, but it's basically just including a shitty motion comic about an airport-crime-novel-esque murderer being executed before a simple DF with a different, weirdly politically awkward skin. It's just not good in any respect. It also used to be mandatory. Just a plain stupid decision from one of my favorite developers. I'd forgotten about it for a while, but boy do I hate it. It's an interesting counter-example to the whole "British/european developers are the main developers taking on American culture in a semi-critical way." discussion about GTA, Mafia and the like. It doesn't work when you're not working off of movies and are trying to work off of an actually real, horrible, complicated and impersonal system. There's a lot of rich ground, I feel, in a game that pushes more on the real-life morality of the US penitentiary system (and private for-profit prisons in particular) by more directly working from the actual strangely gameified profit model of those prisons.

I think there's two sides of this getting a little muddled here. One is the use of (I guess we've come to ableist as the basis of offense in this particular discussion, which works.) ableist language in everyday, casual "Did you see that crazy video/lame video/retarded video?" style language, and one is the use of ableist language in describing particular social or political things "Did you hear about that insane new bill in congress/that retarded thing that politician said/those crazy people whose agenda is very different to mine?" when one very definitely wants to insult and degrade an opposing view. My main issue is there, in that I don't want to use language that, in total, contributes more to negative effects on people I'm not directly talking about than the people I am talking about, but still want to very much insult people whose political or social views I find abhorrent. The vast, vast majority of ways we have to insult people depends on some broadly socially negative stereotype of someone. I think language itself depends on that fact, that the way we denigrate people is by way of comparison to people we find to be lesser, and once you remove mental, physical, racial and sexual differences from that you end up with only the generally accepted name for the group or person you disagree with, and that's not going to function as an insult to them. It's just their name, and suddenly you end up with no tools because of an interest in not using hurtful tools. I guess I'm mostly reacting against Twig here, even though I can't find a specific post that encapsulates what I object to. I feel that there is a very important, very complicated line between 'unusefully hurtful language' and 'usefully hurtful language'. There are absolutely things in the world that intend and have the capacity to achieve results far more hurtful to the groups we're discussing now, that have no similar impetus to monitor their language the same way anyone concerned with this is. There is certainly a balance between effectively combating people who intend, very directly and explicitly, to remove and roll back laws regarding the social, political, economic and individual well being of hundreds of thousands of real people who will directly suffer because of those possible actions. There is definitely a balance to be struck between the harm of calling Rand Paul crazy and the harm he could do if people who disagree fail to act in a similar linguistic and social sphere as the people who are possibly swing-able. On a purely anecdotal level, I've had a lot more success (as a 'crazy' liberal socialist) talking to traditional, conservative people in my area when I get aggressively insulting in any way I can to their usual leader's positions. For better or worse, a lot of people simply do not care or notice about anyone's efforts to avoid insulting anyone. Many people see it as a reason to disregard your position prima facie. I guess basically I really don't think there's a binary choice between 'BAD' and 'GOOD' when it comes to language. It's inextricably tied to (unfortunate) social ideas about the worth of people with various physical or mental disorders, and you can't just set aside anything that can be offensive to anyone ever. Human experience is far, far to broad to do such a thing. I guess in summation/for clarification: (1) I'm a little drunk. Spring Break WOOO.) (2) I'm writing a paper recently. (3) There isn't a binary between "Shitbird" and "Good Person". Language is highly situational. The world isn't a morality slider on the stats screen. Sometimes 'bad' and 'good' can be mixed together, and the end result has to be measured as the difference between the two. Sometimes negative language is necessary to individually maintain a larger sense of right. I don't know that I could stay sane without occasional calling someone a motherfucking moron with idiotic, neanderthal-esque ideas about the world. If I actually had to maintain perfect PC language I'd be so pissed and frustrated I'd be right back to baseline SD asshole-ry. People are fallible. Everything is so fucked in terms of 'normal' outlook that I'm willing to take a whole lot of bad with a smaller amount of good. (4) I also think the internet isn't comparable with ingrained human thought as to the visibility of their speech and the possible broader effects of it. (5) I love you Twig, and also I love you Gormongous in particular. Also the rest of you. But not megaspel. So far I don't love them. Sorry.

Crazy is a weird one for me. It's not helpful to people with mental issues, it's not terribly constructive when actually talking about a thing someone did ostensibly due to mental illness, but there's really no other word that has the same meaning, and that meaning is really useful to describe things that are done that don't match your framing of reality. It's used in a lot of different and complicated ways too. A lot of gg-ers seem and are called crazy, which is neither helpful to the actually mentally ill ones or a useful criticism of the more earnest ones. I'm struggling to describe the 'just assholes' people without using reductive language at all, as it turns out. There are just some things that, in normal conversational speech, seem to require reductive language to describe one's actual feelings. That's not helpful when you're trying to avoid hurting people with speech, especially when it's describing the people who are (1) intentionally hurting people and (2) only concerned with linguistic consideration when it can be used to discredit you. It's paralyzing. Probably the most common media example of 'crazy' being used is mass shootings and the like. The immediate media diagnosis of the situation is usually "They're crazy/mentally ill", which is used interchangeably both in media and in normal speech. That's not good for the same reasons, but what other way is there to describe that situation? A lot of people who do do such things are mentally ill in one way or another as well. Anyone who seems to hedge on it gets called out as apologist (Oh, so he's just crazy so it's fine?), and it can be seen as equally offensive to mentally ill (Oh, so ALL mentally ill people are just a hair-trigger away from mass murder?". I think part of the problem is that there's little differentiation in the broad world of 'mental disorders'. Someone with an anxiety issue or depression or whatever is in the same medical and social category as a sociopath or someone who's had a complete mental break. The social stigma of taking a pill or seeing a doctor to make your mind 'right' is very absolute. Politics and whatnot has the same issue. How else does one describe Sarah Palin except as sorta crazy? Her politics are based on a very definite internal understanding that makes sense to her, I've known enough conservatives to get that, but what's the word for a political or social outlook that differs from your own in such a way that seems to imply intentional blindness to certain facets of reality? I know conservatives have the same reaction to me as I do to them, but what else is my crazy conservative uncle other than crazy? Those are the words I was thinking about the word 'crazy' I guess.

Using 'they' really depends on your audience understanding that you're talking about a specific person and not a group of people, and that it's a word that's also used for people whose gender you don't know or who don't identify with one. It's small and seemingly obvious, but I've had to have some awkward explanations of friends' sexual identity with strangers before because it's a fairly small number of people in the real world who've ever even considered the pro-noun thing. On Ze, Xe, and Zhe (the ones I've actually encountered in the world, I'm sure there are others.), I always wonder how much of an improvement that would be on a wide scale. I think it'd be pretty hard to divest people from their he/she worldview, and it seems like it only increases the otherification in the meantime to use a word that starts with a x or z. Both letters usually tend to suggest more exotic/weird things in english (Zebra, xeno, zeno, xylophone, x-ray, etc) and it feels a little scifi to refer to someone as xem or talk about xyr car or whatever. It feels a bit like an alien's name. Fortunately in normal speech they just sound like a weird pronunciation and are accepted a bit easier. Also, in my obviously limited experience, people are more likely to use them if they specifically do not identify with any gender, and don't use them for people whose gender is simply not known. Me, I just use people's first or last name to refer to them. Saves on the entire debate, and it helps me actually remember names when I first meet them.

Small towns, bars and whatnot will sometimes hold chicken or cow shit raffles to avoid the law that says only charities can hold raffles (I don't know if that's everywhere in the US or just here). Basically what you do is mark out a grid space on a field or pen, number each grid space and sell each space for $5-15 or so. Then you put a cow or chicken in that pen and wait for it to shit, and the first square it shits in wins. Sometimes you put in multiple chickens or cows for contests with more than one prize. Typically the prize is something like a rifle, a years supply of beef, or once a ice shack. I see one every year at the big pheasant opener town feed. We all get together after a long day of shooting birds to eat pulled pork and gamble on bird shit for guns. It doesn't count as a raffle mostly because I assume judges think it's too silly to really consider. Some people treat it like it has a serious strategic element. The country really is a weird place.