WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
8mo ago
FEAR is definitely on my to do list. Although right now I'm striving to beat at least Warcraft II's orc campaign.
WhiningCoil
9mo ago
That actually reminds me how many youtubers do their virtual sets in Unreal Engine. I don't think I've seen a single one use Unity.
Frankly, having dabbled in Unity, I'm not sure I can really recommend it for much of anything.
WhiningCoil
9mo ago
Just face grain. The first glue up is in clamps right now. Trying some new techniques for a really flat panel glue up, so we'll see how it goes. With the butcher blocks I ended up with a lot of buckling and shifting that I corrected by doing it in halves and putting them through the planer afterwards. I'm using some calls this time to try to keep it flat. I also used some winding sticks to try to get the pipe clamps flatter as well. I think the surface I was doing glue ups on was putting a slight twist on everything I glued up.
If I'm lucky, I can have this first board finished tonight. Well, at least the assembly, the finishing might take the rest of the week.
WhiningCoil
9mo ago
I don't feel confident enough to try to sell my work.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I have contempt for many problems I am forced to solve that shouldn't be problems in the first place. Problems and contempt go hand in hand.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
A) I'd love to if I wasn't now eating bans for it and
B) I'm not growing more sensitive. I find the overly sensitive values here repugnant to me, and to avoid having to meaningfully interface with them, I'm going to use an AI. Seems the perfect tool to resist the inherent weakness of this place bleeding back into my world view.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I was not joking, and i seriously am contemplating using chatgpt, because a lot of these are coming out of nowhere at me. At some point the overton window or the vernacular allowed here shifted out from under me. You think I "uncorked" but that was me trying to problem solve. You only further proved to me I now need an AI sensitivity reader to post here.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
The entire rest of the internet is top down enforced "polite lies". This place was supposed to be different. Alas. It's become "rationalism, unless it hurts another self described rationalist feelings."
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Reality is unkind. I won't be wrong.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
So I have seen that trick. And it works for when there is light to even moderate squeeze out on some touch inside corners. Gets like, 95% of the glue, resulting in just the faintest lightness around a glue joint. It's not altogether an unattractive look.
However on this project I made a huge mess with those 4 way glue ups. The straw trick was utterly inadequate.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Maybe?
Age of Empires, Rise of Nations and Empire Earth are kind of like that, and you can always play a custom match with a buddy where it's you and him versus an AI of an appropriate difficulty level. Comp stomps are a time honored tradition of RTS fans who aren't good enough to cut it against actual people. Like myself.
The Settlers was always a series that had a fairly in depth economy and a languid pace. I'm not aware of what it's multiplayer options were from version to version. No explicit coop I'm almost certain, but a custom game against an AI with a buddy may have been an option.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
It basically lets you compose FM synth music. There are trackers for almost every FM synth platform. Some are more fully featured than others. It's a world I'm only just now dipping my toes into.
For example, here is one called Adlib Tracker II which targets the OPL3 chip. Mine is not going to be nearly that complex. Both because it's focusing on the OPL2 chip on an Adlib card, and also because I don't know enough about trackers to even know what half of those features do. It'll let you configure the channels, the beats per minute, and play notes on different channels, change some other global settings, and that's about it.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
Yeah, but some things are worse than others.
Right now I'd rank UI Programming as the worst. Although I'm developing a sense for a style that works more formulaically and facilitates changing the layout at will.
Some things I actually find really convenient, thanks to x86's exposed BCD and "string" instructions. Likewise, it's loop and rep instructions.
Then there are the things that simply aren't possible with most platforms today. FM synth is a great way to programmatically create music, and directly programming the registers of an OPL chip is relatively straightforward in assembly. I guess it's not easier than telling Unity or Unreal engine to play an MP3. But if you were trying to build up something from scratch, it's a million times better.
Same thing goes for graphics programming. EGA or VGA aren't that bad. You set some registers, then start writing to memory space. The equivalent "hello world" for DX12 of Vulkan is many times larger and more complex. Which says a lot when you are comparing it to assembly! Once again, there are libraries which dumb it back down. You could use SDL if all you want is to throw pixels up on a screen. And there are always engines like Unity or Unreal. But once again, if you feel the compulsion to build from scratch...
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I've been slowly plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I think the end is in sight. I'm on the last chapter. Just having fun doing side quests at the moment. Wrapping up a bunch of side stories with respect to the various colonies.
I'm finding XC3 rather weak in a lot of areas. But one thing it's doing well is having the side quests related to a specific colony tell a cohesive long term story about how that location is coping with the changes you are causing in the world. That said, while I enjoy the narrative arcs of the side quest, their actual construction seems the worst of any XC to date.
That said, I'm finding the combat much more poorly balanced that previous entries in the series. And with far less of a feeling of agency controlling 1 party member out of 6 versus 1 out of 3 in previous games. Enemies, especially enemies you enormously out level, are way to damage spongy. The level caps on the job system severely impact my enjoyment exploring it.
I was watching one review of the game, and they said something I really agreed with. Probably the best part of XC3 is it's restraint. XC2 had some serious weeb cringe, and XC3 corrects for that extremely well.
I'm excited to see the ending, but I'm just not feeling myself and pulled through the game as I did in XC1 or XC2. Instead of being excited to do things in XC3, I find myself settling for the lowest hanging fruit. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
I may, but my target platform is a NuXT, which is basically a slightly suped up IBM XT SBC. Because of the Trident 9000I VGA chip they chose, it's technically capable of VGA. But from everything I've seen, the CPU really can't push the pixels for it. So I want to stick to EGA at least for now.
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
It's on my to play list as well. Have a hard copy and a stable of vintage machines that could run it. Trying not to distract myself from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 yet though. I really want to try to finish that game before I let my attention wonder.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
I just put the 4x8 sheets on my SUVs roof rack. There is a pretty simple plywood rack you can easy make with 2 2x4s and metal brackets.
WhiningCoil
1mo ago
I'm worried about making a fortune off crypto and other investments without any funny business, and being thrown in a rape cage by a DC judge because fuck you that's why. They'd probably dig up my conservative leaning post here as further evidence about how much I "hate America" to supply the motive. Might even explicitly not allow me to present evidence that all the transactions are legitimate some fucking how.
After what I've seen done to Jan 6'ers, I have no expectation of justice if the DOJ notices me.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I’d feel bad about it but for the fact that level of emotional incompetence can’t be helped in someone old enough to have lived through the dotcom and 2008 crashes as an adult.
You know, the funny thing about this is that, unless you were invested in stocks at the time of the dotcom bubble or the 2008 crash, it won't help your emotional incompetence. Part of my learning to stay calm and hodl on was panic selling my 2 year old 401k (moved from stocks to money market) at the bottom. I had just started working, I had a very small amount in it, and it was a valuable lesson I had to learn the hard way. Sure would have sucked to have put that off for 40 years instead.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Is cost averaging a real and prudent thing or more of a cope? Honest question, hehe.
I cost average because I have no idea what I'm doing. My most successful picks have been jumping at companies I like. I played the Nintendo Switch, and Breath of the Wild, before it was released and decided it was the real deal. This was at a time when everyone thought Nintendo should get out of the hardware business, and it's executives has taken pay cuts for their failures. It was deeply rewarding jumping on that stock.
I bought Nvidia back in 2017/18 because the Steam hardware survey routinely showed something like 80% of people had Nvidia GPUs. I've been an Nvidia lifer since my first Riva 128. Seemed like a no brainer to me. I can't say I ever saw this AI boom coming, but I knew they were a well run company with good products I use to the exclusion of all else.
I dollar cost average in because I mostly buy and hold forever, so investing cash comes at a slow and steady pace monthly. I also know I'm not educated enough to pick an entry price and throw down five or six figures on it all at once. I keep investing if I have faith the company will eventually do well (like COIN), or because they've been consistently rewarding (like V).
Sometimes I take profit. I had to pay off a $5000 vet bill once while I was saving for a house, so it came out of stocks. When ATVI got bought out I was forced to sell. I also finally cut a bunch of losses and took some profit from several stocks, when I threw down a fat wad on COIN.
Throwing down that fat wad on COIN turned out to be a terrible mistake, and that particular wad is still down over 50%. But like I said, I liked COIN at IPO prices, and I liked it 10x as much when it was 1/10th the price. So it all worked out in the end. Still, that was an expensive lesson. In the future I won't be doing that. I should have spread my wad out over a much longer time to be safe. If it goes up, good, if it goes down, that's alright too.
WhiningCoil
4mo ago
I might know what you mean about the visuals. There is a certain style of soft, bright, cartoonish, often utopian woodland fantasy art that started off as annoying to me, and grew into an all consuming hatred.
The art and theme of Against the Storm is not that, thankfully. It has a distinctly Lovecraftian vibe to it, had Lovecraft been born in dark ages Germany and feared the deep wood, instead of late 19th/early 20th century New England and feared the mongrelization of America.
WhiningCoil
4mo ago
I wound up with Frostpunk at some point. I forget how or why. Didn't click with me. No idea why.
Been playing Quake coop with some discord buddies. Its awesome. We tried nightmare but the 50 hp cap proved too punishing with some of the nail trap hallways. Went with hard difficulty, but with friendly fire. It was glorious chaos. Played through the first three episodes in a row last night.
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