WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Yeah, I own a first edition copy of Talon I've yet to crack open. It's on my pile of shame.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
GMT has a very wide range, and Space Empires 4x is a very approachable alternative to SFB (and you can play it on BoardGameArena).
Space Empires 4x is legit great. It's been years since I last played it, but the last time I did I played a fairly small scenario with a buddy of mine. I had horrible luck exploring my system, and he was raking in extra production points of colonies well before I found a single one. So I invested heavily in speed and initiative tech, and harassed the fuck out of him. Constantly parked my weakest units over his planets to block their production, and then ran them away when he was forced to respond. I made up for my terrible luck by stealing the initiative, and I took it pretty far.
Unfortunately my friend has really bad analysis paralysis, and around 2 AM I just couldn't possibly play any longer. My first serious competitive fleet rolled off the assembly line, and we staged one last battle where all the dice split in his favor and I was left with nothing but smoking wreckage. We called the game for him then. But man, that first part of the game I really fucking enjoyed. If we had kept going, I may have pulled it off since at that point I had been fucking with economy so long, I had actually leapfrogged him despite starting in such an inferior position.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
I have a few favorites that may or may not have digital implementations.
- Twilight Struggle
- Command & Colors: Ancients
- No Retreat!
- Sekigahara
- Storm over Stalingrad
- Washington's War
WhiningCoil
1d ago
An Elizabeth Hargrave rant wells within me.
Do tell? I've been significantly checked out of the hobby. Just broke my heart when GMTGames, one of my last bastions of male, pale and stale that I enjoy so much, cancelled Scramble for Africa in response to massive backlash around it's "colonizing" themes. I heard a smidgen about Wingspan winning all the awards, and some accusations of favoritism because it was designed by a woman. But nothing that implies the sorts of hysterical cancellation games or vote rigging that occurs during say, the Hugo Awards.
That said, Cards Against Humanity is a terrible game that's funny once and then just becomes endless dick jokes.
Yeah, not liking Cards Against Humanity because it gets boring is fine. Because it does. Not liking Cards Against Humanity because it goes against The Ministry of Truth... that's a whole other things. Leave it to a Brit to treat 1984 like a manual.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
No clue, because even if someone got the original edition, if they were conformist enough Days of Wonder allowed them to request updated game components with the Arabic slave trade expunged.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Me too. For a time I tried to write a board gaming blog, and it used to get a lot of traffic when I'd post it to reddit. But eventually the politics of the sub just crowded me out. Especially after the mods themselves started parroting lines like "Everything is political" when I complained that I just wanted to enjoy some escapism. And this was back when people were arguing over Days of Wonder removing slaves from Five Tribes (still have my copy with slave cards), or when a game I backed on Kickstarter, Draco Magi, had it's cover artwork censored to make the woman on it less "sexualized". I think the final straw was when Shut Up & Sit Down posted this terrifyingly Orwellian review of Cards Against Humanity essentially stating it was a terrible game because it caused you to have politically incorrect thoughts, and people should not play it to avoid accidental thought crimes. This point of view was not appreciated.
Things have gotten so much worse since then.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
One of those nice board gaming tables with the recessed playing surface and the toppers for dual use. Been my project the last few months. Bought the lumber all the way back in April. Had to finish making the new kitchen cabinet doors before I could get to it though.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
I think my wife has even less resistance to this shit that I do. She brings up stuff even I never heard about. So at least I know I'm not tanking my marriage by being too online.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
My point is not that I don't care, it's that I'm trying not to care and failing. Include my post in my failures. There just aren't a lot of places I can get that meta about it.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
I'm gonna be honest. None of this shit is good for my health. Just this whole presidential cycle, the constant hysterics and nonsense about this judge or that prosecutor or some bureaucrat. Endless think pieces about how every single bit of minutia will decide the election. I've been trying so damned hard to just tune it out. I'll start paying attention again in October when I'm about to vote, but maybe not even then. I'm so hardened in my choice, it's difficult to imagine anything changing it.
Yeah, I watched the first debate, because I wanted to see a primary source first hand before the spin machine got to it. That was sad. Biden was old, but Trump seemed old too, just not as much by comparison.
Yeah, I got sucked into the hysterics after the assassination attempt, but I'm trying to stay away from the conspiracy rabbit hole. I want to believe it so bad, I have a feeling if I start down that road, next thing I know I'll be getting sued for $1B.
I honestly didn't believe Biden would drop out, but here we are. All the coup talk, it tickles my lizard brain, which makes it even more dangerous.
I think I need to try harder to just ignore all that shit. For starters, it stresses me the fuck out. Second, it keeps me way too distracted from work and family. Third, I'm so close to wrapping up this bitchin walnut gaming table I'll be posting all about in the Friday Fun Thread, and the last thing I need is to be doom scrolling instead.
Fun aside, had a huge storm around here lately, and for whatever reason we lost cell phone reception in our area again. So now my shop it totally unreachable digitally. I kind of love it.
I just want to go into a coma until after the election at this point. I'm done. I can't take it anymore.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
WhiningCoil
4d ago
What would there be for the Dems to gain for hiding Biden's death?
Who knows. Maybe they are so addicted to lying, it's so much their first and most natural impulse, that they do it even when it serves no purpose what so ever. This has been shown to be true for Hillary Clinton and all the made up stories she tells, Biden was a habitual liar his entire political career and it tanked his Presidential run in the 80's, Kamala has been caught plagiarizing stories and adopting them as her own. I was listening to Dan Carlin, one of the Supernova in the East episodes I think, and he mentions Roosevelt had a reputation as "a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well" or something to that effect.
It may be time to consider that most politicians are just congenital liars.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
I'm pretty sure I could write a C program right now that would run in Windows 10 that will load and run arbitrary assembly instructions from a binary file. The C program might have all the trappings of a proper Win10 executable, but the file it loads and runs sight unseen wouldn't. I'm pretty sure that's what the Crowdstrike driver is doing with the file full of 00's.
That might be how executables in an operating system work. Wouldn't be how extremely low level BIOS or ROM code that is meant to be executed before the OS loads would work. I can't say for certain exactly how that works these days, but when I was troubleshooting some BIOS code on an old computer of mine, I found myself decompiling a VGA BIOS. And that basically works by being in a certain memory block, it begins with a consistent signature to signal "Yup, there is code here" to the motherboard BIOS, and then it begins loading and executing instructions at a certain offset to initialize the card. Fun fact, you can actually reinitialize the VGA BIOS with a short assembly program that just CALL's to that location if memory serves.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
So I keep trying to find any information on the technical aspects of this failure. As in, why is it bricking systems. I get that it's a driver that runs under the operating system, and it's failing to load. But why? I've only seen random reports that Crowdstrike literally pushed a corrupted file onto millions of systems, which is rather remarkable if true. If it was actually a bug, I'm deeply curious to hear what the bug was and how it slipped through.
To get really wild and speculative, lately it's been getting reported that Intel 13th and 14th gen I9 CPUs might be defective at incredibly high rates, upwards of 50%. These defects manifest in whole hosts of ways like BSOD, software crashes, and memory errors. I wonder if it's possible a defective Intel CPU borked the executable of an otherwise rigorously tested release. Like I said though, pure speculation. The nature of the Intel failures are still being investigated anyways.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
You underestimate how hard it can be. Especially when the evidence is routinely destroyed and/or the people who control the data refuse to hand it over.
In my state, someone did go county by county inspecting voter rolls and identifying non-citizens voting. They made it through a couple counties before the Democratic governor caught on and instructed all offices to stop cooperating with them. Then to add insult to injury, when the incomplete report was released, the Democratic spin machine acted like it was a nothing burger because it "only" found several thousand noncitizens registered to vote, and a smaller proportion of several thousand actually voting, "in the whole state".
WhiningCoil
7d ago
That was the argument. I can add 6 paragraphs largely repeating myself if it helps. I've had to resort to ChatGPT to please you guys before, I can do it again. Although I think I still have my copy of Dilbert's Desktop Games which had a bloviator. That aught to be good enough.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
With a TFR of 1.786, our population of citizens is not increasing. On the other hand...
Like I said... questions.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
A path to victory? Possible. A path to the most votes ever in history again?
Well, like I said. I'd have questions.
WhiningCoil
7d ago
Who cares if the model is accurate? Its not supposed to be. It exists so that when Biden gets the most votes in history again, you can point to the model and call everyone asking questions an election denier.
WhiningCoil
8d ago
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
And why in the name of all that is holy does Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle still have a job?!
It's scenarios like this which make me notice.
Imagine you had a primary care doctor, who hated you, and just more or less entirely quit giving a fuck. Ran test to pretend they were doing something, but then largely just ignored the results and took a very "Whatever happens happens, fuck that asshole" approach. How much culpability would they have when they just passive aggressively ignored that you had a fetal, but treatable disease that goes on to kill you?
Women are far more passive aggressive than men. And everything we learn about the failures around this Trump assassination feed into the stereotypes of vengeful passive aggressive women. Cheatle committed gross negligence of her duties tantamount to pulling the trigger herself.
Admittedly, I may have been too cynical. Biden's obvious mental decline is proving stickier post debate than I thought.
Edit: On further reflection, I think I was correct in how the Biden admin would try to manage it. Try to recover with some very selective, heavily scripted appearances where he has it at least as together as he did pre-debate. They clearly tried to execute on that, with the Holt interview and the "Big Boy" press conference. It's just not working. The vibe shift has been too much. The core of my post, that normies would be put back to sleep, seems to be false.
I guess I could double down, and say be patient, the regime will find the correct narrative xanax and the normies will resume their slumber. I can't rule it out. But that really doesn't seem to be the direction things are going. More over, all their "Trump is a unique evil that must be stopped by any means necessary" rhetoric suffered an enormous blow to it's effectiveness after the assassination attempt. All their dog whistles, or just overt statements, about how it would be justified to murder Trump to save Democracy got a lot too real, and people are recoiling. So that narrative xanax got flushed down the toilet too.
I donno. Maybe they'll still pull something out of their hat. But at this moment, my cynicism with regard to normies seems unfounded for once.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
Pushing your argument to the extreme means that any politician that isn't pro-social-panopticon deserves to be murdered by the criminals for their soft-on-crime policies.
I mean, as much as people falling out of plains "deserve" to die when they hit the ground. It's less "deserve" and more natural law. You allow more crime, you get more crime, including against the politicians that allowed it.
WhiningCoil
9d ago
Is it? Then please enlighten me as to the benefits of permissiveness towards illicit open air drug markets.
Well, googling what she looks like more or less perfectly matched what I imagined from her politics. So I guess there is that.
Reminds me of Charlize Theron.... in Monster. That hairline in particular made me wonder if we were talking about an actual woman at all, or a person who went the male pattern baldness to estrogen route you start to see more often.
But nobody ever praised board gamer for their looks. Or smell. So you can't say she doesn't look the part.
Man, now I wonder, can you still chew the body odor at Gencon?
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