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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • You’ve got some moderately highbrow and transhumanist stuff in there; have you tried Greg Egan? The two starting places I like to recommend are the Clockwork Rocket books (natives of a universe with alternate physics explore it and figure out what’s going on, kind of Flatland turned up to 11… and then up to 121…), and Permutation City which I think will meet your “some very interesting ideas” and then keep accelerating.


  • I think demand for legendary armor is high and sustainable enough that the situation may continue pretty much indefinitely. The grind required is huge, and a lot of people are undertaking it with great enthusiasm, and looking at the examples provided by other legendary equipment supports the claim that interest will hang on more or less indefinitely. I’m still constantly running into people who want to do raids to work on that armor or Coalescence, fractals for Ad Infinitum, etc, and those projects have been available for years.

    Note that I’m using the word ‘may’ here because all this is wild speculation about what players will do en masse; it’s not a hill I’m going to die on.


  • Your analysis stops before you consider how one might actually make money from rifts, specifically by using the essence you loot to make motivations and selling said motivations on the market. Just poking at it casually yielded ~160 gold from motivation sales for me recently, some of which was of course eaten by the other materials needed for motivations. It’s worth noting that besides activities mandated by the story, I used zero motivations myself - there are plenty of people tagged up and doing them, and you want t1 and t2 rifts for this purpose more than t3 anyway. I wasn’t very seriously trying to make gold with this, just running around with friends who wanted to do rifts for their own reasons or collecting xp to fill in mastery tracks.

    Deciding whether this is a good way to make gold relative to other options would require significant work, but that’s where you want to go if you want an answer.




  • Hey again, you’ll probably need a minute to remember making this post, but I saw Intergalactic Fishing was on sale in the Steam Summer Sale, so I went ahead and bought a copy. This lives up to everything you’ve said - I very much enjoy the gameplay of messing with the lure puzzle minigame and collecting information on all the fish in any given lake, and I’m absolutely wanting to catch Just One More Fish.

    …I guess I’m hooked.

    Thanks again!




  • I finished Overload this weekend, so I’m wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn’t seem to be cutting it, so… we’ll see. I’ve got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there’s always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.





  • Oh hey it’s you again! (from the ‘what have you done outdoors this weekend’ thread) I actually wandered around Garden of the Gods and some of the River to River trail last year, and I’ve sometimes wondered about going back to the area. I found some pretty cool views on the section I did hike, and obviously Garden of the Gods is freaking amazing. Is there a lot more to see on the River to River trail? Your photos seem to say yes.

    People other than ffmike are absolutely welcome to answer as well of course, I just think it’s neat to recognize someone.








  • Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny. Brilliant, prescient, and genuinely a great work of literature all at once. The story of Rild, the telling of the metaphor about fire, so much else, it’s been all these years and I’m still quoting it.

    Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart. When my will to go on falters, this is one of the books I turn to for comfort. It’s beautifully written, it’s hilarious, and it just makes me feel better.

    Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Spider Robinson. I genuinely have handed this book to a troubled young person and had them find a better understanding of the human condition between its covers. I didn’t expect that, I thought I was sharing a cool book with them that was something I’d found influenced how I am, but it happened. It’s kind of a big deal. It’s also actually a lot of fun to read, it’s just a collection of short science fiction stories set in a bar, right? …right?

    Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers, Lawrence Watt-Evans; Watt-Evans is largely a moderately obscure (as far as I can tell) fantasy author. I love the rest of his work because it’s much more human than a lot of fantasy, with people who are bumbling and desperately trying to handle bizarre problems they’re ill-equipped for and sometimes making their problems worse than they dreamed and also there are wizards. (I also like some of his worldbuilding choices, but let’s get on with this). This one short story (that won a Hugo and stuff), though, lives rent-free in my head forever; it’s got a simple point, which is that the world we’re actually in has a lot of cool stuff, go enjoy it, but it makes it in a very fun way and, well, okay, enough, I love it.

    Calvin and Hobbes. All of it. Bill Watterson is a visionary genius.

    I can go on, I haven’t mentioned Douglas Adams or Sandman or Transmetropolitan or fnord or ten thousand other things, but I have other things to do and should content myself with finite length.