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PaperclipPerfector  6hr ago (text post)   245 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 23, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been trying to get an AI to help me vibe code a mod for the game timberborn. I'm trying to shoehorn in an eastern cultivation system. Immortal beavers, with super beaver constitutions and abilities.

I went to the mod page for the game and I'm not the first one to have the idea of AI coding some mods, especially if the sample mod images are anything to go by.

Made me wonder if any other games are having a modding Renaissance right now.

New fish just dropped. Well, technically it was discovered twenty years ago, but they couldn’t find more samples until just recently. I for one did not know a pipefish could look like that.

Ha, it's kinda funny to think of new species as something like a creator god dropping a new album.

I asked last week if I should play Blue Prince and I did! I got to the 46th room in 18.5 hours. I have my qualms, but a very cool game over all.

I'm aware there is a lot more to do than find the 46th room. I'm taking a break but I'll jump back in soon. I have a few ideas of where to go next, but I'm a little aimless, so I'd appreciate some nudges from the motte crowd. Here's what I'm aware of:

I have one red letter

I have not connected a boiler room to the laboratory

I have not read the fine print on the book or paper (I can't remember) in the master bedroom

I have not opened the diary in the queen's room

I have two of the four outdoor areas

I briefly saw online that I should return to Room 46

I have not figured out the naming art pieces puzzle

I think the biggest one to progress is: Have you placed the foundation?

Yes, you need to do that to reach Room 46 (I assume).

Have you gone down the elevator? And opened that door? The next part of the game makes extensive use of that area.

My husband and I got to room 46 and then thought the same thing "we'll just take a break" and then never came back to it. I get the feeling that there are diminishing returns, and you can grind another 20 hours to find the next ending or whatever but at a certain point the randomness and needing to plan things over multiple days gets annoying.

Prior to our migration from Reddit, @naraburns posted a review of The Cult of Smart, Freddie deBoer's non-fiction book about the shortcomings of mass education. I keep coming back to it, it was a really perceptive deconstruction of his arguments.

I'm glad it continues to serve you! I put a lot of thought into it.

Can I ask whether something prompted this callback? It's a pretty CW review so maybe this is not the right thread for discussing it on those terms. But as an educator I think (or hope!) that some aspects of education do belong in "Friday Fun."

Nothing in particular, just that I found it so entertaining to read that I kept coming back to it – there are a lot of great zingers in there. I'm happy to delete this comment if it's not appropriate for this thread.

I don't think there's any problem with leaving it as is--plus it has already generated some perfectly acceptable meta discussion. I just thought I had better lampshade the fact that this is the Fun Thread before anyone else decided to make any substantive commentary on what I wrote! (And I probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all if we hadn't had some recent boundary-testing of the Fun Thread.)

Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review. There are a lot of movies I would like to give similar treatment, but I happened to have the time and the inclination to write that one, and it just came together so well.

So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack. You don't have a lot of posts, but you continue writing them; it seems like most of the Substacks I see fizzle in less than a year. Sometimes I think I should blog, but... insert excuses here, I suppose. I find this kind of writing easier to do in a forum than from my own platform, for whatever reason.

So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack.

There are honestly periods where it feels like pulling teeth, and I end up just digging out a comment I posted here and polishing it up a bit. One of my new year's resolutions was to write a new post every two weeks, and while the average interval between posts is 13 days there have been several weeks where I fell behind schedule. I don't know if I'll keep up this pace in the new year, I haven't grown my audience as much as I was hoping to.

Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review.

Not having seen it, is it worth seeing unspoiled?

I can’t believe it’s been 4 years since the migration already.

Reddit is so broken, "load more comments" stopped working for me logged in. Probably because they are trying to block logged-out browsing again (and failing, anyways), but it's another reason we're better off separate.

Yeah, the site has already lasted longer than the subreddit (3.5 years), which lasted (a lot) longer than the containment thread on the SSC subreddit (~2 years, I think?). One of these days I'm going to find a sufficiently nerdy hydrologist who is willing to help me understand whether this metaphor is any good, but I've started thinking of internet communities as islands of sediment in a branching river... the same forces that build us up also tear us down, and moving off of reddit slowed our "deposits" but also slowed our "erosion," in many ways.

Four years is nuts. I was here when we moved! I can't believe it. Go us, I suppose!

Been playing Total War: Shogun 2: Complete Edition with my bro. I wasn't exactly looking forward to the Complete Edition. In fact, its release happened upon me pretty much at unawares, and even then I didn't see the point, Shogun 2 seemed eminently playable to me as it was. But my brother took an interest and suggested a co-op campaign, and I wasn't about to let slip the opportunity for some sibling time.

So, the Complete Edition, for anyone else who might have an interest: It's a presumably vibe-coded trash fire of instability, buggy UX and suicidal AI. In fact, the AI is often so bad that in the rare instances in which it acts competently, it takes us by surprise. And then the game crashes. My brother swears that the game looks better than the old version, but I can't tell the difference. In fact, I generally couldn't say that it improved upon the original in any way.

The complete edition was pulled from the shelves less than two days after release.

Shogun 2 is my most played game on Steam (I still fire it up regularly). Before Steam, I've got the cds for Shogun i picked up decades ago.

I have very little faith in Medieval 3 (or whatever they end up calling it) being worthy as a successor to M2.

Edit: Oh btw, someone re-comped the Medieval 2 .exe (and Rome TW .exe) and gave it a bunch of new graphics features and other stuff recently:

https://github.com/Pannoniae/rex/releases

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